11-17-05

Well I finished off my latest rigging training with a primitive looking but extremely functional character. The link on that page is a download of the character file for people who have Maya and feel like playing around with it. Please let me know of any feedback you have, it's the fastest way I can improve myself.

I'm now fully undertaking my next large rigging project, which, as I mentioned earlier, should be a capstone project that will allow me to start seriously job hunting. The concept art is in its fourth, and probably final, stage of refinement and should be appearing in here shortly.

10-27-05

A much, much larger update to the gallery page. My next rigging project is also underway. I think this will sort of be my capstone project and should help finalize my demo reel. My next update should finish off the gallery section and start in on the content for my next project.

9-24-05

As promised, here is the first update to my gallery page.

9-11-05

So I haven't had anything to post up on the website lately but I thought I would fill people in on what I've been working on. Siggraph was a bit of a bust, I didn't get to talk to much of anyone to get feedback on my demo reel and I certainly didn't get any interviews. I did get to talk to Brock Stern, a Rhythm & Hues employee I had met previously, and he passed on my demo reel to the character TD there. His response was that I'm on the right path, everything I have on there looks good, but I need to show some more examples of good compression in extreme poses. This made me happy because that was the area I also thought I was lacking and was going to focus on next anyways.

I discovered some serious flaws in Gerry's rig, when it came time to assemble my demo reel, which rendered him completely unusable. So, before I undertake my next big project I want to make sure that nothing like that happens again. With the help of this trusty new rigging book (well worth every freaking penny) I've started to focus on the basics a bit more and really strengthen my ability to create robust skeletons (a statement that makes me feel somewhat like a mad scientist). Consequently, I've been doing a lot of neat stuff but, since I've been working with just joint chains, it's nothing all that interesting to look at. However, I do plan to start rolling out the 2D section of my website over the next several weeks. I'm starting to scan in my artwork and I'll be posting bits and pieces up a week at a time. By the time I'm done with that I should at least be to the starting point of my next project.

7-21-05

I'm in the final homestretch before Siggraph which has me both giddy and nervous as hell. I finished off my new Demo Reel a few days ago and just got it compressed and put up. Just for the record, compressing video is about the least fun thing ever, especially when you have as small of knowledge as I do about the process. Perhaps I will enlist the help of my video editing co-worker to become more familiar with the process. Anyways, I'm in the last stages of getting my demo reels pressed and all the print materials done up. My experience as a designer has certainly helped with putting the whole package together.

In other exciting news (at least for me), CG Toolkit just released a book on rigging targeted at intermediate users and I just received it a couple days ago. I must say that it looks like it was well worth the money and will go a long ways to substantially furthering my knowledge of rigging. Awesome.

7-10-05

So I've had a number of recent setbacks, not the least of which was a neck injury that kept me from working at my home computer for a couple of weeks. I also ended up completely re-working the Doc Oc tentacle setup. I got towards the end of the tutorial and I decided I didn't like their setup, which drove the whole tentacle with a spline IK and nothing else. Looks great in an animation but sucks ass when trying to interact with objects or planting on a surface. It's also none too easy to try and pose the damn thing, so I ended up scrapping it and putting together my own. I ended up with a three skeleton driving system that allows you to set a general pose (or work completely with) a single IK handle and then put in the more curvy looking bits with a spline IK. I wrote a Mel script that snaps the controls of the spline to the appropriate places along the tentacle whenever you turn off the single IK control. I was fairly pleased (actually I was dancing around giddy when I got it to work) with the results and will definitely be putting this one on my demo reel. I ended up scrapping the Doc Oc character because I wanted something simple to test my controls with and I also don't want people to associate this with the tutorial since I altered it so much.

5-8-05

I've made significant progress on the rigging of the Doc Oc character and now have him in a poseable state. I have a few tweaks to do to the set driven keys and then it should be ready to do some rigging test demos. I've also thought of a way to salvage using the rig for my demo reel. I recently found out a way to set up a control scheme for particles using expressions to control start and end points as well as the tangent flow using locators for easy keyframing, so I'm going to set up a control scheme for the Doc to shoot laser blasts (or some such thing) from the claws. I'm excited to start getting into scripting since it's going to make my job as a rigger about a hundred times easier.

5-1-05

In the midst of the madness that has been commencement I started on a new project. Since my focus has turned more towards rigging I'm trying to expand my skills in that area as much as possible. In a recent issue of 3D World there was a tutorial on how to set up a Doc Oc tentacle type scheme and I thought that would be a useful thing to learn. So far it's been pretty easy but I've learned a handful of new and useful things. Since I'm following a tutorial and the model was already complete, I don't think this will take too long to finish.

4-22-05

WooHoo! I just finished off the re-rig of Gerry. I get to start the animation test now, since I'm sure that there are things that I've forgotten or don't work that will only show up during animation. It feels good to be back up to where I'm supposed to be though.

4-21-05

As it turns out, the majority of the video files on my site can't be played on a Mac. Macs apparently only come with the capability to play Quicktime files and all my Gallery videos are in AVI format. Those of you coming here with Macs there is a handy site a friend sent me that has a plugin to work around this problem, but this is only for the time being. I will shortly be rendering out Quicktime versions of all the demos and putting tests into the site to direct Safari and Firefox users towards those instead. Since I am preparing for my commencement and all the hoopla associated with it this next week, the Quicktimes aren't going to happen for a few weeks.

In other news, I'm almost back up to where I was with Gerry's rig when I discovered it was broken last time. I just have to add the set driven keys to the controls and he'll be good to go. Also in a few weeks I hope to have my test animation up here.

4-13-05

I put up some new files today from Gerry's rig. Some quick tests to show the influence objects at work. I'm fairly happy with the way that his joints are compressing in general. I had to remove the influence objects in his wrists since they were causing weird issues which I know how to avoid in the future, but I simply couldn't go back and fix at this point (without reverting to a much earlier file at least). Progress continues to move forward and I happily just avoided a similar gimbal lock problem with his foot controls. Barring total diasasters I'll be caught up by next week.

4-7-05

Well here's the updated site. I know that it looks pretty much the same but it should load much faster now and I've made it much easier to update. Consequently I'm going to be updating on a much more regular basis now. I'm pretty close to being done with Gerry. I actually thought I was done with the rig but during the initial animation test I discovered that there was a fatal flaw in one of the controls. It took me several weeks of troubleshooting and testing before I finally found the problem and in order to fix it I need to revert back to a file from about mid-January. It was very frustrating. The file is progressing once again and I'm hoping I'll be finished again by next week. I'll take the time to give some quick rigging demos in the gallery.

For those who want the technical explanation for what happened, it turned out that when I set up the right hand over the mirrored bones, I created the thumb before the rest of the hand. Consequently the X-axis of that joint was oriented towards the thumb instead of straight ahead. This meant that when I set up the hand controls, no matter what I did, the hand control was gimble locked by default. This screwed up all my connections, expressions, and set driven keys and basically caused his wrist to collapse on itself when it was put into certain poses. Blarg.