Introduction:
This Week’s Lecture:
This Week’s Task:
For this week’s task, our lecturer had asked us to complete the workshop we did in class if we weren’t able to finish it completely during our lecture.
I began by opening up this week’s workshop scene file, which consisted of a character model and its rig, as seen in the screenshot below.
Next, I opened up the HumanIK system, where I selected the character’s rig and clicked on the ‘Create Custom Rig Mapping’ button.
I now had a skeleton appear on the right side of my screen. My next task was to correctly assign the character’s rig joints to the joints on the skeleton on the right side. Our lecturer recommended that we should rotate our character’s arms so that they’re straight before assigning joints to prevent potential errors from occurring during this step.
Once we assigned all joints together correctly, we were now able to create a new rig by clicking on the ‘Create Custom Rig’ button.
Now that we had a new working rig, we then brought in some animation data. To bring in Mocap data, we opened up the content browser menu, where we could select various types of animations.
Once we found an animation that we liked, we brought it in by dragging it into our viewpoint. The animation I chose was called ‘WalkTurn’. To get my character model to mimic the animation, all I had to do was change the source of the skeleton’s controls to ‘Walk2Turn90L1’.
During the second part of the lecture, we reopened this week’s workshop scene file and focused on IK Handles and Controls this time instead. As you can see in the screenshot below, we began by creating three IK handles, each for the leg, foot, and toe.
After creating the IK Handles, we moved their pivot points into specific positions, mimicking how a human’s foot and toes would move if rotated. The scene file already had a layer, consisting of multiple locators, of where the pivot points should be positioned, meaning all I had to do was to snap the pivot points to the locators.
Once the pivot points were now in the correct position, our next task was to create a control for the foot. Using control was a lot more efficient than moving each joint individually to animate. We used a ‘NURBS Circle’ for the controls, reshaping it to represent the shape of an actual foot.
We also needed to create a control for the knee as the ‘Left Foot’ control couldn’t control what direction the knee bent towards when the foot was lifted. Therefore, I created a knee control, as seen in the screenshot below, where the animator would be able to move it from left to right to change the direction of where the knee would bend.
Whilst creating the controls, we added additional attributes to them, allowing the foot to perform specific types of movements that couldn’t be performed strictly from the rotation tool.
The last thing we did for the second part of our workshop was to sort out and structure our geometry, joints, locators, and IK handles into groups, now that our controls were fully complete. The purpose of this task was so that we maintain a neat and structured workflow.
For the last part of the workshop, we focused on working our way up the skeleton rig by creating controls for the spine, beginning with the pelvis. I created the control, using a NURBS circle, and parented it to the pelvis joint. I then enlarged the control, using the NURBS circle’s vertices, so that it’s big enough to fit around my geometry.
I repeated this step again three more times so that I had a separate control for each spinal cord joint. Before I parented the controls to the joints, I made sure that I froze the transformation, meaning that the controls’ position was reset to 0.
After freezing the transformation and parenting the controls to their assigned joints, I could now rotate the controls to move the skeleton rig.
As all movement was correct, all I had to do was resize the controls again, using their vertices, so that the controls were visible once I add back in the geometry.