Tuesday, July 9, 2013

problems fixed and snake painted

I had some problems with the rabbit rig yesterday that carried over into today. But I fixed it this morning! Weird things were happening with the combination of the rig, blend shapes, and other cluster deformers. Ended up being a combination of the hip pole vectors going insane (as they do) and one of the clusters on the spline spine whacking out. The pole vectors were straightforward enough to fix once I figured out that they were to blame, but I still don't know what went wrong with the highest spine cluster. I just had to detach the skin, delete history, and reattach it. So now one spine cluster is a little lower than the others, but it still functions the same way and doesn't effect the rig in any noticeable way. After that, the new blend shape I made (for the millionth time) from a newly duplicated skin mesh worked fine.

After giving up yesterday, though, I instead spent time painting the snake and it looks FABULOUS. I think there will be two snake puppets: one for slithering/sidewinding and one for posing and more nuanced movements. The slithering snake uses two nonlinear sine deformers and was surprisingly simple with beautiful results. Right now I'm working on the posing snake. It has a joint skeleton and a retractable mouthpiece with some killer fangs that swing out when the jaw opens.

 I'll put up some pictures at the end of the day.

Edit: Look! A picture!
The colors look a little off, but that's just from the default render settings...

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