Latest Showreel (2015)

Showreel of rigging and tool development (2015) breakdown

00:02 - 00:27 CG Workshop Face Rig: Rigging Only
00:27 - 00:47 One Per Person (Traceback Studios)
Additional Rig Controls for girl's eyes to aid shaping of eyelids. Additional Rig Controls to
feather rig on hat to fix double transformations. Additional fixes to eyeballs to aid automatic
scaling fix when blinking to avoid interpenetrations.
00:47 - 01:11 Little Bridge - Face Rigging Tool
Face Rigging used for multiple characters. Poses can be copied across characters to aid quick rigging (Copyright © Little Bridge World Ltd)
01:11 - 01:31 Little Bridge - Rendering Tool
Scripted in Mel-Tool used to streamline rendering of assets for Avatar System in Flash
(Copyright © Little Bridge World Ltd)
01:31 - 02:03 Personal Project - Belt Tool Rig Tool written in Mel


Showreel from Angelika Aibel on Vimeo.

Rigging & Tool Showreel

In a previous blogpost I was talking about some of the work I have been doing with tool development but I wanted to also show it in a bit more detail. Here is my new showreel of some of the stuff I have been working on and some personal projects. The reel breakdown is as follows:

00:04 - 00:28 -> Face Rig: Rigging Only. Model etc. provided by Judd Simantov.

00:29 - 00:54 -> Avatar System: Writing Mel tools to streamline pipeline for use in Flash and responsible for integration to Unity. Expanding existing rig. Creation of lowpoly assets as part of a team.

00:55 - 01:05 -> Rendering Tool: Mel-Tool used to streamline rendering of assets for Avatar System in Flash (more in previous blogpost)

01:06 - 01:35 -> Biped Auto- Rigger: Written in Mel featuring dynamic parenting, FK/IK arms and FK/IK  stretchy spine.

01:36 - 02:30 -> Belt Tool & Rig: Tool written in Mel, mentored by Martin Parsons as part of the Move on Up Scheme I was part of.

 

Showreel 2013 from Angelika Aibel on Vimeo.

Tool Development for Avatar Pipeline ...

In the last few months I have been working a bit on the avatar system here at Little Bridge. I am responsible for improving the avatar pipeline and also creating and integrating more assets to the avatar. This involved a lot of restructuring of scene files and some rigging & skinning.

As the avatar assets are not only used in Unity but also in Flash, I needed to come up with a tool which deals with rendering of each single item of the avatar (sometimes in conjuntion with other i.e. bodyparts or the mattes) and also the avatar's bedroom while adhering to different pre-existing naming conventions as different programs needed access to it. I ended up using Mel and automating the rendering process with only the least necessary user input while maintaining as much flexibility as possible. It really paid off...what used to take one person more than a day in rendering off and on could now be done in a few minutes and the renderfarm could do the rest when running it there.

While I was doing this I also added some features to make it easier in Maya itself to change the look of the avatar as this is often needed for renders for marketing material. This makes it a lot more fun to use I think in Maya itself.

I am looking forward to further improving the avatar and the tools that my colleagues use and making it as quick and easy to deal with as possible.

Avatar System used in conjunction with Unity

Update - Mechanical Rigging

I always wanted to see if i can't get the beltrig I create with a script to act a little bit more dynamically and interactive WITHOUT using any dynamic curves....I think I might have found a way :) I wanted a belt around two wheels to react to size changes of the wheels and also distance changes, like you would find with a rubberband I guess.  Hopefully I can get a chance soon to integrate those features into the script i wrote a while ago.

The new manual part of the rig can be seen around 35 seconds in...first there is a recap of the scripted mechanical rig.

Additional features to belt rig -rubberband like behaviour without using dynamics from Angelika Aibel on Vimeo.

Update - Face Rigging

I created another little video showing and testing the face rig I created a while ago. I am looking forward to eventually going back and really enhancing it with some more corrective Blendshapes. It can get quite complicated to control corrective Blendshapes once you get quite a few...It would be a great challenge to come up with a system that does so reliably.
Face Rigging from Angelika Aibel on Vimeo.

Facial Rigging -Range of MotionTest and Demo

Well i am finally getting a chance to test the rig I made. There is only very limited correctives on the rig, but am gonna keep working on it. More just a test on how much I can do with just the joint deformations.

Range of Motion Test & Demo from Angelika Aibel on Vimeo.

Here is another little ROM test, this time for a couple of poses of the cheeks just to see what the poses look like in motion...Still a first draft but liking the feel of the cheek puff- need to work on the sneer though...not looking motivated enough in my opinion.

Here is just a little ROM test for the eyebrows

Facial Rigging Progress

Well I got the placement of the joints done and have done my first pass of initial skinning. I only have a still image atm but hopefully will get a chance to do a ROM video soon!

Facial Rigging

After doing more generalist work, I found that I had to get some rigging in again as I missed it so much. So I recently started looking into facial rigging again as I have started a course on it, and I am loving it. You can learn so much by just looking at different poses in animation and try and figure out what kind of controls would have had to be in the rig for the animator to achieve that pose.