A long overdue update

I haven't really been updating my blog much as busy has been an understatement for what I am but here is a quick update. Using the video tutorials kindly produced by Phil I managed to get the whole person rigged, animated and skinned in under a day. So thank you Phil your videos really did save me :) The whole process was fairly uneventful and the whole rig went smoothly and everything worked. I couldn't ask for more, so here is the rig :) Thanks again Phil

Fcaial animation pictures

I was advised to use blend shapes for the facial animations which turned out to be fantastic. I love blend shapes, they are so easy to use and rig up and they really are quick to do. It is a shame they are so heavy on memory as I'm sure they would be used for everything.

The response to rigging

I don't like it. I did learn how to do it and everything did turn out well in the end however I really can't deal with rigging. Yes I can do it, just about, but do I really want to....a lot? No. It's sort of like UVing but that is a necessary evil for modeling. Rigging is most likely a a necessary evil for animators, which I'm not fond of either.

I'm not going to be an animator basically

The lights

The lights were not as bad as I thought. Again I got help with them as the expression editor confused me quite a lot but once I was show how to use it (then swiftly had the example deleted so I could do it myself which I quite liked) I started to understand how it could be used to control lights, I still had no idea how to use it for the body suspension but the lights were simple enough. Have the nurb circle controller as the driver and the light as the driver so when the circle is moved to the left the light turns off and when moved to the right it turns on.

An example of the expression I used:

spotLight1.visibility
=
nurbsCircle1.translateZ

The rear light controller has a set driven key which was interesting if not a bit more fiddly adding drivers and driven things then adding the same drivers for when the lights are off. I feel that many things could go wrong once you get complacent with it.

I also had a master control which controls the whole car and allows it to move and turn. This has a point constraint in the X and Z and a rotate on the Y which was simple to do.

screenshot of all the lights

The master control to move and rotate the whole car

The expression driven switch on the bottom, the set driven key on the top

The body roll

This was horrible but I was taught a good workaround to get the same result with a much less confusing method. The original method to get the body to roll side to side, front to back and up and town was to create 2 more groups, change the pivot points to the front on one group and the back on the other and the create an expression in the expression editor so the body can lean forward and backwards as well as roll side to side. The method I was told about has only one controller, highlighted, that controls the body roll, suspension and tilting by having the pivot point at the base of the car and having the controller control the X,Y and Z axis and then having limits placed on them to stop the rotations going too far.

The wheels

The wheels were fun to do as I had to separate the wheels into a group for the wheel and a group for the brakes to allow me to rotate the wheels without rotating the brakes but also turn the front wheels along with the brakes and move them up and down for the suspension (controlled by the highlighted circle)

The highlighted arrow controls the steering

      

                             

                                           and this one controls the wheel spin for all 4 wheels

The Outliner for the wheel grouping 

The bonnet and boot

Sounds like a mechanics pub

But anyway I did the same method as the doors but I constrained both the bonnet and boot to the X axis and added limits in the X axis too.