Skinning pass, at mega-speed, made to a bat rig.

I worked on this guy about 2 years ago. Originally planned to use this footage as a skinning tutorial but i never got off the ground fully. With all this footage I decided to try speeding the entire process and see how interesting it looks.

Modeled by Shon Mitchell.

For more information about the rig, and to see it in action, check my previous post!

Kinect Disneyland Adventures came out in November 2011. We brought on a freelance Character TD to help share the load and I was responsible for his work as well as my own rigs All the characters were implemented using Character Studio to client’s specification.

James Bond Blood Stone 007 came out in November 2010. The project was mostly animated in MotionBuilder but Maya was used to build the character skeletons and setup secondary movement for clothing. I helped setup various NPCs and enemy characters for this project.

I gave a simple lecture regarding making rigs that are pleasing to the eye; it’s a somewhat obscure topic that I find most schools don’t fully touch on. Thanks again to Cogswell for inviting me and I look forward to seeing some new talent graduate!

For those that attended the lecture. After the jump, you can find my powerpoint slides asawell as a link to the pipeline book I talked about but failed to recall the title at the time (Implementing a Digital Management System. ISBN:0240806654)

Presentation Slides

Masterpiece: Final Fantasy VII

“FFVII is filled with so many unforgettable, emotional scenes that it’s no wonder it still has such a large following. From the opening sequence and the bombing of the first Mako reactor to the final battle with Sephiroth, there’s a lot to take in.“

Extra Credit!

“Substantial reward is very important to help motivate the player to push themselves to get better and try more difficult challenges. The difference between unlocking a new way to play the whole game or unlocking a digital badge, or hat for your character is quite large, but adding something as in depth as a new playable character also comes with its own set of difficulties”

Analysis: What the Video Game Industry Can Learn From the Death of Glam Metal

“During the heyday of spandex, excessive use of hairspray, and sing-a-long hair metal anthems, a tiny music scene called grunge managed to rise to greatness, as evidenced by Nirvana’s rise to the top of the music charts. The over-saturation of glam bands in the late eighties and early nineties is a perfect analogy for what’s happening to the gaming industry today.”

Talk Sport Street Fighter IV vs StarCraft 2

“There’s something distinctly feminine about choosing to get really good at a game. Unlike the very male experience of playing whatever, whenever, basically playing as much as you can get, basically waddling around the game shop with your trousers round your ankles, choosing to get good at a game requires commitment, or even devotion. More difficultly, it also requires that you choose a suitor.”

Analysis: How Does the Infinity Ward Fiasco Affect Call of Duty?

With all the departures, is Infinity Ward doomed as a studio? What about the quality of future Call of Duty games? GameSetWatch interviews some analysts and looks on into their takes on the company and franchise.

Not Captivated

Lorin Baumgarten’s take on day one DLC model, particularity the  model used by Capcom in Resident Evil 5 and Lost Planet 2. In short, he’s not a fan

Nice Guys, Stressed Ladies and the Curious Ways They Play Video Game

Amusing anecdotal article from Leigh Alexander on video games and escapism.

I went with an IK/FK setup for the arms and claws using a three-bone setup similar to the legs. FK was a simple setup but I ran into a peculiar issue with IK that has to do with the scorpion model. The arms of do not have a wrist joint, so there’s no way to control the orientation of the claw whilst moving the arm around in IK. My initial tests found the IK mode very unintuitive, but since the setup is completed I’m leaving it in, for completion’s sake. Fortunately, the FK arm works like a charm.

Node graph showing the math nodes I used to make the guns spin. Note that time1 is a predefined node that exists in every Maya scene.

On the ends of both arms are claws with a gatling gun in the center. To give the animator easy control over spinning the barrel without directly animating the rotation, I created an “expression” using render nodes. Nodes perform much better than MEL expressions in animation, however, it’s not immediately obvious how to link nodes to the timeline. Expressions are nodes as well; creating an expression that uses the predefined variable “frame” links the expression to a node that’s created with all Maya scenes known as, “time1″. The Time node holds the current frame of animation. Linking this node to some math nodes, offers much of the same functionality as an expression, but with superior performance. The rigged the spin of the gun barrel using two MultiplyDivide nodes that evaluate how much to spin the barrel each frame. The spin is controlled by a custom attribute on a control object and there’s an additional option to “offset” the spin by rotating the control. Incorporating the offset required an additional node known as PlusMinusAverage, which adds the offset to the result generated from the Multiply nodes to give the final rotation value.

With the arms finished, the rig is nearly done; all that’s left is some cleanup.  Here are the steps I took to cleanup the scene.

• Delete any unnecessary objects such as duplicate geometry, curves, etc. that aren’t linked to the rig. When I’m not sure if a questionable object is part of the completed rig, I simply select it and see if any parts of the rig turn purple (Maya’s visual cue that the selected object has outgoing connections).
• File->Optimize scene to further remove empty nodes, and unused skin influences
• Attach all animation controllers to a quick selection set for easy access.
• Lock and hide attributes on said controllers that don’t affect rig (optimizes animator’s workflow).
• Lock any group nodes or joints the animator can accidentally navigate to by pickwalking.
• Group objects in Outliner down to only a few top nodes.

Much of these are fairly simple tasks, and scripts can go a long way to assist in scene cleanup. That about covers everything for now, in the next few parts, I’ll start putting the rig through its paces and show how to add and remove features to a rig without losing the work of the poser/animator.

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!

The legs are made up of multiple joints, so unlike a bipedal leg, there are multiple “knees” to take into consideration. Driving the entire leg with a single IK chain is the simplest approach, but limits the amount of play with the extra knee joints. On the other hand, making multiple IK chains to express the limb allows more flexibility, but makes leg placement unwieldy. The setup I’m using will offer the best of both worlds since it’ll use both setups at the same time. The base skeleton is made up of multiple IK chains, and these chains are driven by a singular IK chain using a duplicated skeleton. The setup is connected to three animation controls. There’s a main control, a pole vector control to pivot the knees without shifting the foot, and a pivot control to tilt the leg around the foot. The pole vector controls have the ability to switch parents between either the body, world, or leg control.

It took a few passes to get the setup just right and then I repeated the process across the other legs and did some cleanup of the scene (all the duplicated joints were cluttering up the outliner).

Segmented Ik handles that are parented to "Master" and animation controls. These are directly connected to the main skeleton.

Singular IK Chain that drives the entire leg named "Master"

Embedded videos of cartoons seen in Heavy Rain

I thought I saw Pyrats during my Heavy Rain playthrough, check out that and the other two animations!

Making Decisions Matter In Morality-Oriented Games

A analysis on the current design faults with games that use a morality systems.

What Virtual Worlds, Facebook And Fads Mean For The Game Industry

Opinion article comparing the current “social game” boom of new to the “virtual worlds” boom of old, plus how does social games impact the core game industry.

The Gears of Hype

“The gaming industry is not shy when it comes to hype. While it may feel, to avid followers of a particular game, that there is never enough media – there usually is.”

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.

An example of my IK/FK network using a 3 bone setup and blendColors

A unique trick with my particular setup is how the base chain is driven: most IK/FK setups I’ve seen typically use constraints and the switch is handled via tweaking the target weights. What I do, is instead of using a constraint, a blendColors render node is used. How this works is that the rotations of the IK and FK joints are plugged into the blend node as two different “colors” that can be switched between using a blend attribute unique to the blendColors node. Not all IK/FK solutions are good for this approach, but when it works, I’ve found blendColors easier to deal with and somewhat faster to compute than constraints.

With the skeletons created, I did some tests to figure out the best IK solution for the leg (which I’ll dive deeper into in a later post), and did a full pass rigging the FK joints for all the legs. FK is a pretty straightforward scheme, but it also allows me to test if my joints are properly oriented before the rig gets too complex. Joint orientation is especially important for mechanical legs since the hinge joints are engineered for movement along a specific axis; if orientation is off, the joints would break off the hinges and look incorrect. A very handy script for orienting joints efficiently that I’ve been using for years is cometJointOrient.

With more of the skeleton completed, I built more of the proxy version of the dense scorpion mesh. Like the rest of the character, I needed to reduce the poly count to improve performance without sacrificing the scorpions silhouette. My process for proxy-ing the legs involved duplicating the original mesh and reducing the poly-count through merging, deleting, and collapsing any superfluous detail. Since the model is designed for smoothing, much of the polycount comes from the modeler’s use of “support-edges”. As such, I was able to make significant reductions without impacting the look of the scorpion too much.