For this part I’ll go into some detail about the setup on the arms and claws as well as touch on a few other things as I prime this character for his first round of animation testing. More after the jump!
Tag Archives: tricks
Rigging a Scorpion Mech: Part Six, IK Legs
I mentioned in an earlier post that I thought the head would require the most complicated rig to work. Today’s post is to show that 1) I was sorely mistaken, and 2) the leg rig is quite interesting and borrowed a setup often used for the hind legs of cat and dog rigs. More after the jump!
Rigging a Scorpion Mech: Part Five, Messing with the legs
I’ve now made further progress in rigging the legs. For the limbs, I’m implementing an IK/FK setup. My approach for setting up the switch is a twist on the standard 3-bone setup where the original joint chain is duplicated and influenced by two separate chains.
Rigging a Scorpion Mech: Part Four, Progress on Proxy Model
Reduced model to about 12k polys. The original model is about 330k.
Positing a minor update. With the rig completed for the spine and tail, today I mostly focused on creating a proxy mesh for the newly rigged areas. A handy tool I like to use when building proxy models is zooSurgeon. This neat script takes a skinned mesh, breaks it down to solid segments, and constrains the segments to influencing joints. I incorporate this script in my workflow by first skinning the reduced mesh using solid weights (one joint per vertex), and then running the script to get my true proxy. For me, this is efficient because I can preview the behavior of the proxy prior to breaking down the model.
Rigging a Scorpion Mech: Part Three, Tail, Spine and Adding Some Control
Without legs or claws, the mech looks kinda like a snake!
Here we are, part three, and progress is looking good. For this post, I’ll describe some of the processes I’m using to set up the spine and tail’s behavior. Read on!
Vertex Weighting Tool for Maya
Download python script for Maya
The Weight Tool is a Python script designed to make your skinning life easier. It streamlines the process of manpulating skin weights on the vertex level with a neat UI. I came up with the idea of making this tool after skinning some rigs in 3dsMax. The result is a script that works very similar to 3dsMax’s built-in Weight Tool, but in Maya now!
Installation:
Like any python script, this will only work in Maya 8.5 or later regardless of OS (tested only on Windows). To use the script in Maya, simply copy all the scripts from the archive into your PYTHONPATH. Once copied, restart Maya and type “import WeightToolInterface” in the python command line. To start using the tool after importing, type “WeightToolInterface.draw()” in the same commandline/scriptEditor.
*Note that you can find your PYTHONPATH by opening your Maya.env file with a text editor (usu. located in …/My Documents/maya/versionNo/Maya.env). If PYTHONPATH is defined, simply copy the scripts and continue from there.If PYTHONPATH is NOT defined, type in the Maya.env, “PYTHONPATH=C:/your/script/path/here”, replacing C:/your/script/path/here with a real system path you wish to install Python scripts to. When editing Maya.env, be sure to restart Maya to apply any changes.
Feel free to post any feedback!
Tips & Tricks: Animated Texture in 3ds Max
3ds Max is relatively new to me and I’m very much used to the way maya does a lot of things. To get an animated texture to work in Maya, you simply make a material and assign an image sequence or movie to it. Max also does this but there is a snag.
When importing an animated texture in either package, the default is to sync the texture’s animation with the scene’s time slider. For the particular project I’m working on, I need to to have the frames of the texture controlled by a control in the rig so the animator can play with it (the texture in this case being the pupil of a cartoon eye). Max’s bitmap has no way of reconnecting the active frame of the texture. There was once a plug-in to achieve this feature, but it’s not compatible with 2008. Running out of time, I came up with a ghetto solution that still does the trick.
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