iAnimate Work - Push

Second project in the iAnimate class. The brief was to do a push/pull/lift so I eventually settled on animating a mime artist. I figured it would help me push the pantomime acting as mimes must be very expressive.

Mime Push from Eoin Coakley on Vimeo.

iAnimate Work - Sneak

This was the first project I did as part of iAnimate workshop 3, "andvanced body mechanics and pantomime acting".
Our task was to animate a walk or sneak, and seen as I'd animated 2 sneaks already, I decided to try and get it as polished as I could, while I had the help and tuition of Michael Kiely.

Sneak from Eoin Coakley on Vimeo.

Rigging On The Fly

I got this character from Basim Ahmed who's working in Piranha bar at the moment, he had rigged it himself but I wanted to try my hand at creating an animator friendly rig with controls I thought would be helpful as an animator. The workflow I used with the biped was useful here to a point though I had to edit it quite a bit due to the different anatomy.

the wings where the biggest challenge in this rig, I wanted to have as much control as i cud over them, with some set driven keys to allow for easy posing and curving of the basic shape, while not cluttering it up with too many controls or a complex bone system that would make skinning extra difficult, I learned this part the hard way after a bit of time spent trying to fix what could not be fixed. I also wanted to have a control that made the wings and wing covers fold in so that you don't have to pose them in every time you want them closed.

All of this involved a lot of parenting, grouping and figuring out what combination of parenting, constraining and use of the connection editor as well as the node editor. I also employed some of the dorrito effect I had learned from the previous rig to get the controllers on the lower parts of the wing to move with the deformations. I found this part highly enjoyable, trying to figure out the best, or sometimes only, way that something will work with all the incoming and outgoing connections

FireFly Rig Test from Eoin Coakley on Vimeo.

Below is a quick test animation I did with the rig.

Fully Rigged

I pushed on from my rigged head to rig a full biped character using the skills and techniques I learned on the last piece and adding in a lot more. The character I rigged is XSI man exported from Softimage and brought into Maya

The extra bits I learned and implemented in the rig:

• How to rig a biped character, including setting up the hierarchy and constraints for the controls and what bones to place where.
• How to set up the reverse foot lock so that he can roll on the ball/toes/heel.
• Creating a setup where the animator can switch between FK and IK allowing for greater control of the arms. Three sets of arm bones were created, one for FK, one for IK and one which blends between these two to hold the geometry.
• Adding a twist system for the wrists and legs to avoid mesh pinching when the wrist/ankle are rotated.
• Using extra bones in the knees and elbows to maintain volume when the arms and legs are bent. These extra bones find the average angle of the bones on either side of it to orient themselves in the correct direction.
• Using clusters to control deformations on the face.
• Facial controllers that will follow the deformations caused by the jaw while still allowing control over the shape of the mouth AKA the "dorrito effect".
• A constraint system led by custom attributes on the controllers for knee/elbow/eye controllers to follow parts of the rig or be free in world space.

Biped Rig from Eoin Coakley on Vimeo.

Let the rigs begin

My first attempt at rigging a human head.

It involved using bones and some controls for eyebrows and jaw. and creating blend shapes to achieve a few emotions. The model I rigged is "Samuel" by Leah Apanowicz, found on Creative Crash at http://www.creativecrash.com/3d-model/samuel-free-3d-model

What I've learned:
Lots about skinning and weights due to the huge poly count on the model.
How to build a basic facial rig and model the blend shapes using the sculpt tools to enhance it.
How to link blend shapes to a GUI for ease of access.
How to link blend shapes to the jaw controller to create accurate skin stretching.

Next step is to find a lower res model and try again, this time rigging the entire body and a full range of emotions along with all the controllers I can think of.

Modo Ninja

We've been trying out some new software packages in work. I was asked to test out the animation abilities in Modo. Some great features in it, really nice coming from a classical animation background, the spacing chart allows you create key poses, in-betweens and breakdowns with ease before you have to look at the timing, similar to animating in stepped but a lot more intuitive.  The onion skinning, and motion path and arc tracking are great for sorting out your trajectories. Part of the aim of this task was to see how fast I could animate a basic scene in Modo so I limited the amount of time I had to complete it, took me roughly 8 hours, and I had spent a couple of hours getting used to the basics of Modo before i jumped into it.

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Parkour

Decided to build on the wall climbing exercise I did last year, using a proper character rig, Malcolm, and creating a longer sequence with some extra moves. Collected reference from different parkour videos online and used these to build a course for Malcolm to take. I tried to really push the speed of the movement to get an extra bit of cartooning into it. Once i had the scene planned out it took roughly 2 weeks of animating

Parkour from Eoin Coakley on Vimeo.