We spent the Monday shooting some animation references with Erik Öhman which I found invaluable when starting to do the blocking in. I did also notice some minor bugs in the rigg that I was quick to eliminate – kinda glad I’ve noticed that riggs are actually repair-able, as long as one keeps in mind the labyrinth of connections.

And as of Wednesday, we figured we might want to extent the clip to be able to fit a fade in/out – so I was back in MatchMover trying to add frames unto the sequence which proved to be pointless. Ended up re-doing the whole track in NukeX which turned out to be more accurate, faster and easier to get right. I’ve now managed to get the same scaling in the scene as previously with just a slight offset in translation. But as I’ve only started blocking in poses I thought it was well worth it. The workflow was a bit different and I had some problem getting that amazing track into the actual Maya scene until I found a nuke plug-in to help me.

http://www.creativecrash.com/nuke/downloads/scripts-plugins/camera/c/nuke-camera-tracker-export

Now on to the quick explenation of the Rigg. It has a joint hierarchy being driven by other chains which I control with control objects. I implemented IKFK switching on arms and spine, but opted for only having the option available to create FK on legs if I saw any need for it, so for the time being legs are all IK. The hoof is group-based with driven keys for control, and hands all FK. As the scale of the scene is nailed with Sandra having done some quick skin-shading tests I didn’t implement any scaling funtion, so the only funtion my master control has is initial placement of the whole character.

The driven joint has a splitted mesh of the Huldra parented unto it to allow me to get a grip of what the animation is going to look like – also – the mesh of the skeleton is also parented unto corresponding joints so I quickly can spot problems if let’s say the radius ulna twist would stop working for some reason. This skeleton will later be used to drive the skin mesh together with maya muscle deformers.

Last but not least, as we’re going to have a more close-up shot of the Huldra cowering toward the end of the shot, we’re going to implement a blendshape based facial rigg. As the character had a quite human face we saw that adding life to the face might be a high priority.

So the blendshapes are done. If we notice that there not enough we’ll add some more, but this will do for now.

??Possible problem??

When I tested the blendhapes with displacementmaps where I had removed the faces that would not be deformed, I separated the head from the body and then duplicated the head THEN I made the blendshapes from the copied mesh in maya, imported them into zbrush, made displacementmaps and then hooked them all up to the original mesh in maya.. NOW question, is it possible to export a bunch of meshes from zbrush into maya, and somehow remove the faces that won’t be blended and still connect the blendshapes to the original mesh WITHOUT maya complaining about missing faces? If someone knew if I just painted myself into a corner, it would be nice to know. If someone have a solution.. that would be nice to know to. Maybe I can transfer vertices names from the original mesh to the blendshape ones. They all have the same uv.

Will do some tests later today now, dinner!