Hello HypefroActive fans and welcome to
another beautiful edition of Animations on HypefroActive. Ok so i'm still on my
Dante Project creating morph targets for expressions and
letters. Actually i'm done creating morphs save for some few that i might
create or forgo as I don't think they will affect the Anime project in any
critical way and some others that i give a second thought about refining. I'm
trying to create something more realistic than what i used to do and not
withstanding i think these basic morphs targets will do just fine. Right now,
i'm testing out the morph targets to see if they work fine and so far so
good...yeah , i'm making progress.
So today
i'll be talking about Rigging.
Though i once talked about it in an earlier post on this same blog. After
considering for a while what should drive the mesh, i settled for the CAT Rig. Why? Because i've spent too
much time creating models and my fingers are itching for some Animations.
Setting up the CAT rig won't take more than an hour once you make up your mind
on which to use and you can use the Skin
modifier to attach the bones to the mesh.
The big
advantage here for me is the "hand
presets". With these i don't need to pose the fingers every time i
want a particular hand pose that i have already used within an animation
shot. For instance, a punch or a hand-shake
can be recalled in another frame for re-use instead of posing the hand and
fingers all over again. Once in the CAT Studio, you can store these hand poses
as presets and call them back with a double click for re-use any time you like.
The CAT Studio also allows you to store a whole animation sequence like you
would do while exporting a MOCAP data
(That is assuming you actually do use MOCAP data). In these case, it would come
in handy when you are working on projects where they have fight scenes.
The Con
however to using the CAT rig on this project is that it doesn't come with the IK
spline kind of bones like the custom bones have and this factor would affect it
at the pelvis and body in general even greatly, if you are using 3dsmax like me
that is. In this situation, when you rotate the pelvis bone control, the whole
body rotates with it which is normal. However, there should be a control in the
pelvis region that is linked to the legs and upper body, so that when this part
of the pelvis rotates, the pair of legs rotates with it but the Upper body remains still with only minimal
movements, which is acceptable and desired if you ask me. Well, this rig don't
have that control and even if i managed to insert one like i have done, it doesn't
quite function like what i've just described. Still the rig is just good enough
for what i want it for. CAT rigs are generally meant for quick hand animations
or MOCAP data transfers and would perform badly when it comes to a dancing
character or an animation that would require plenty of rotations at the pelvis.
Ok, so i'm
just beginning to round up the morphs for facial
expressions and i'm heading towards animating something gradually. Eerrr,
it's been a wonderful experience and an eye opener creating different types of
morph targets and learning a lot of other skills on the job. I also have gotten
the sound for it. Because it's African i'll be using an African sound and what
i will be animating to is the popular "gerarahere mhen" meme used here in Nigeria that was created by
Nigerian Comedy Actor, Francis Udega.
Above are
some of the expressions the character is able to perform and that rounds up today's'
episode of Animations on HypefroActive. Ok, so from all of us at HypefroActive, we are signing out until we connect again, keep animating.
No comments:
Post a Comment