|
The Stonecutter is intended to showcase my rigging abilities in particular. my initial aesthetic approach was to strive for a stop-motion level of realism. however, as the work progressed, i found myself drawn towards more realistic muscle deformations. a very significant part of my rigging process is MEL scripting. all character rigs for this film exist as a series of MEL scripts. i stumbled upon this approach while developing my facial control system. i wanted a truly interactive system that wouldn't be limited to pre-defined blend shapes. i wanted something that could really be animated live.
based upon a suggestion by Brian Coffee, i decided to build a Heads Up Display with controls for mouth, eyes and eyebrows.
the circles on the control mouth can be manipulated directly by the animator. this, in turn, produces a corresponding deformation on the 3-d geometry. working out the finer points of this involved a great deal of trial and error. i found myself having to repeat lengthy, tedious processes. i then hit upon the idea of scripting these repeated processes. when i moved on to making the body rig, i decided to create the whole thing as a series of MEL scripts. this allows me to make fundamental changes very easily because i can rebuild the entire thing at the click of a button. linked here is a rar archive of all MEL scripts required to build the Stonecutter rig. the script sc_skinRIGbld.mel executes all the other scripts in order. for deformations i used a series of lattices. the lattices are deformed by clusters that are constrained to bones. this produces a very simple form of muscle simulation. this can be seen here
set driven keys are used to add further tweaks to the movements of the clusters. this system can a produce a very wide range of deformations. linked below are further demonstrations. |
