Environment complete on my side

Just completed doing the environments, hope it looks good. If there is anything you guys want me to add just let me know while i continue to rig the ninja

Single chain IK sover

As the rig develops i gain further knowledge on the tools which are needed to full take advantage of the characters rig. I thought i might as well give up a little summery on the information i found on using inverse kinematics over normal joint orientation, plus this could be a little guide in to using the single chain Ik solver. OK what i did first in order for me to familiarise myself with the IK handles was to produce a mock test on a test rig which represents as the bones inside the leg. To make is easier i will play blast the video of the rig without any IK handles to that of one with IK handles.



As you can see from the above video as i move and rotate the joints you will see the knee and ankle joints also move, there are no bends occurring when they are to
.


After i add the IK handle, it keeps joint on the first cube as i rotate or move the hip joint. But if i pull to far away from the hip then ankle will pull away from the IK handle

Adjusting the orientation of the rig

Just finnished of tweaking off the joints of the ninja rig, i made sure all the verticle joints such as the spine, pelvis, head and leg were having the z-axis pointing towards the same side. Also the ninjas hand rotational points were not in the correct position and is something which i also sorted out. Pictures below

Little message for the rigger

Ok this is towards Dan and Josh as you guys are also going to take part in rigging. The key element to rigging is to have a proper and functional joint orientation. Having the proper local rotation axis for each joint is crucial when setting up and animating a character. Basicly each joint has a local roation axis that defines how the joint will react to transformation. For most part of a character i found out that the default orientation in fine. By using orientation you will ensure that all local axes of the new joints are aligned with the bones that follow.

Rigging update

I’m quite surprised to say that I really enjoy rigging at the moment, unless i encounter something which is really mind juggling then I’ll take back my words. So far I produced the fully body rig for the Ninja character, it’s looking good at the moment. The next stages I’m heading towards are the joint orientation and the inverse kinematics, once I get full understanding of these techniques I will the move on towards the leg, arm and spine set up. I will post some image below of the rig so far

So far so good

Just being rigging over the past few days now and everything is going all good. I’m not yet finished with the rig as i still need to do joint orientation and inverse kematics, i just did a little test by binding the rig to the ninjas body to see if the movement are up to the standards. I think it’s going good so far but ill post some pic with him doing some little movements. Also on my blog i have the full body rig, not complete though

Hitman Character switch

While developing the Hitman character, questioned whether having both me and Josh develop the characters in two different programmes would result in unpleasant effects when animating or rigging. As I mentioned on the group blog, i imported the Hitman character which was modelled in Zbrush in to Maya just to get an understanding of how tall the Hitman would be in comparison to the Ninja. The first problem I discovered would was that the topology was not similar to that of a model done in Maya, in order for me to fix this problem i would have to re-topologize the whole mesh of the Hitman. If do decide to do that it would be similar to me starting from scratch and modelling the Hitman again. The second problem I found was that the clothes were not extruding out of the Hitman body without the body deforming. I don’t blame Zbrush for these problems; it’s the way I approached modelling the character in Zbrush without knowing the correct pipeline for moving between Zbrush and Maya when modelling the characters. Hopefully through time I will learn the correct method of moving meshes across two different software packages. I know it’s not impossible as the industry use these pipeline everyday when given project to complete, this is something that I would have to look in to my own time. And hopefully when i do feel confident enough to fully understand the method of modelling in Zbrush and Maya, I would then say I would be able to model any character given to me.