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.

Update

The brief of the project has slightly changed...instead of just rigging the beam engine manually, I am trying to use a modular approach to the rigging with scripting to reuse certain parts.

The first part that is being rigged using Mel Scripting, is the part of the beam engine which drives a belt around two wheels. This could be reused for, i.e. tank tracks, bicycle chains etc.

This is still a work in progress but here is a quick update.

WIP - Modular procedural mechanical Rigging from Angelika Aibel on Vimeo.

Beam Engine

My next project is some mechanical rigging- I want to animate a beam engine like the one shown here.

I think it would be an interesting project. At the moment I am trying to figure out how the engine works and try to see differenr ways of rigging different groups of elemts of the engine in order to get a clearer idea of what is required.

I am also trying to come out with a more comprehensive idea of what is needed in the rig to make it the most flexible and user-friendly for animation.

ANY THOUGHTS OR COMMENTS WOULD BE VERY APPRECIATED!