Soon I have to begin animating again to meet the deadlines required for the Echoes project but I feel I can leave the rig as it is for now and come back to it later if time permits. So far though I have managed to create an eye rig and cotroller as well as a control setup for all the existing joints.

The eye rig is simple and efficient enough for an animator to use and has a couple of handy features. The animator can rotate either the upper or lower eyelid or both at the same time to create open or closed eyes but the most interesting feature is the fleshy eye setup. Using a simple deformer, when the eye moves in any direction the skin around the eye also moves and deforms with it. Making this feature appear noticeable without being exaggerated was certainly a challenge and there was a lot of trial and error to get it right but in the end I feel I got there and perhaps with a little more tweaking I could clean it up a little bit extra to make it that bit more effective.

Still going with the head rig, I have begun to work into the more fiddly areas of the rig including the nose and ear joints. The nose proved an interesting challenge that I ultimately managed to complete - after far too long having to sort out the weighting.

Placing the joints and setting up their pivots and constraints was easy enough but (I believe due to the wrinkles around his nose) it became tricky to get the weighting correct juggling influences between the nostrils, upper jaw, main nose joint and eyes. I never anticipated it to become such a challenge after it worked so smoothly in my initial weighting tests. Eventually I got there though with some pretty nice results around the nostrils and I even added a little custom control allowing the animator to 'flare up' the nostrils with a simple slider.

So far I'm making good progress with the head rig having so far managed to block some weights for the head pivot bones and upper and lower jaw. It is still a little rough and with no real controls setup yet but it gives me an idea as to how the mesh will deform and what areas are going to be problems ones. I have also begun to block in the eyebrow deformers with cluster controls and, like the rest of the rig, they are a bit rough still but again provide a nice starting point that I can continue from here.

So this week I have continued to work on my Major Project but slightly veered off from animation onto rigging again. I felt that my centaur rig was OK but overall there was room for improvement and the sheer amount I learnt whilst doing it would vastly improve my abilities at rigging next time I tried.

With that in mind I decided to rig a human head (something I never really got to do with the centaur) and this is the progress I have made so far:


Essentially I have placed the bones in areas where I believe they will be most beneficial creating them for the eyes, upper and lower jaw as well as the neck and head pivots. In the next few days I hope to weight the bones to the mesh and then begin to place a basic set of controllers. After that the interesting (and difficult) stuff begins like working with blendshapes for the eyes, cheeks and forehead.

I am now almost half way through major project and on course to graduate uni in less than 4 months! (scary thought). As such, we had a 'sweatbox' meeting where very student compiles their work together and presents to the class for feedback, checking on progress and generally having a nosey at what everyone is making. So I rendered out the couple animations I've done and compiled them together here.

They are still are quite rough and there is plenty of work still to be done but generally I'm happy so far and the general consensus is I am doing OK. I've fallen behind a week or so but strongly believe I can make that time back up over Easter no problem. Currently I am working on finishing a rough animation of the Fae attack and Bark Basher walk backwards and the hope is these will be done before our Easter break so they are ready to be chucked into the engine for testing.

As posted before, the Centaur rig is complete and been handed over for animation but I thought I'd post up a quick video and walkthrough of the features available to animate with.

If more time were available I would love to get back in and fix those IK/FK switches and arms as, after animating with it for a little now, I really miss using FK arms. Using just IK has been fine for the Bow carrying hand and will certainly be useful when constraining the arrow to the hand but trying to achieve secondary motion has been a pain. Other than that though, he is generally fine to animate with and the amount I've learnt from doing this can only make my future rigs considerably better.



Rig Test from Matthew Watson on Vimeo.

Continuing on with project Echoes, I have begun work on a couple animations for various characters including the Centaur, Fae (the player character) and the Bark Basher (our boss character).

Each character has a very different personality and function so going to each animation requires a different mindset and ideas on how they interact with the environment. The couple of rough animations I have here are the Fae's primary cyclic animations, the Centaur's canter and the Bark Basher's basic attack.

So far, I'm pleased with how the Fae is progressing. Here I have simply tested with different timings and poses and have been given the go ahead from the directors  for this time frame of about 24 frames for the main cyclic jog animation. When I begin to polish I would like to push the 'springy-ness' of the legs, really getting a feel for how agile and light-footed the character is.

The Centaur is proving to be a tad more problematic. Trying to hit the poses needed to show the character's flexibility has proved difficult without messing with some of the skinning and breaking the realism of the character. As I'm not going to find any centaurs down the local petting zoo, most my research has looked at movies and games for inspiration (specifically Harry Potter, God of War and Narnia). Of course, horses have played a great part in getting the base poses down but the trying to work out what the human part is doing or what they are thinking has been a challenge to say the least.

Finally the Bark Basher has proved to probably be the most fun to work with so far. His huge, cumbersome size coupled with them massive bulldozer-like arms make for some interesting shapes whilst also asking some fundamental physics questions  - like how the heck does he eat?!?!

This last month I've been working on creating a rig for the Centaur character (created by Dean Paupe) as part of the game project that I have the privilege of working on  - Project Echoes.

Creating a rig for such a character was no easy task, effectively being two characters fused together. Yet the greatest difficulty was surprisingly in the spine, where trying to create a flexible spine that could deform appropriately and effectively connect the horse and human bodies together took much longer than anticipated . But after many hours (and several flipped tables) I got there in the end using an IK driven spine that (mostly) acts a center of gravity and control for the rig and the spine.

 In the end, most of the features that were planned are present and it can perform most animations that are needed. There are still plenty of improvements I would love to make (adding full FK controls to both arms and controls for the quiver are just a few) but I needed to get it out asap so me and the other animators could start working on it - there a lot of animations for this game!

So within the next couples weeks expect a lot of animations using this and the other characters and rigs made by my fellow students and hopefully in the next month or two we should have elements of our work in engine and playing.