jeepers creepers

Where's you get those peepers?

 

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...

What a day

Rainy walk over to the lab only to rediscover that there's an all-student meeting this afternoon about planning our graduate degree show and it's over in one of the other buildings. Ugh. Not much time to work over here today so I'm going to block out some of the backgrounds and environmental stuff. Here are some shots from yesterday. I was trying out a pose that the rabbit will end up in pretty often to make sure I had the skin weights alright, especially that his underside didn't fold into itself.

Day off & UVs

I took a little break yesterday and didn't come in to the lab. My eyes and brain were fried from solving Monday's problems and I just couldn't bring myself to sit down and deal with unwrapping UVs. Instead, I stayed at home, read some of the research materials for the written component of this project, and saw a movie. Let's call it researching camera moves and angles...

Anyway, this morning I unwrapped and messed around with the rabbit UVs. Think they're all right, I'll throw some color on it this weekend. The checkerboard doesn't seem too stretched out. We'll see.

Did some fine-tuning with the skin weights. Getting there...

Painting weights:

Testing some checkerboard:

UVs:

spline conundrum -> binding skin

We had some technical difficulties this morning with the spline spine that started a little domino-effect down the hierarchy of controllers and manipulators. I didn't get around to actually binding the skin and starting to paint weights until this afternoon. Here are a few fun poses. Shaping up well!

Bunched up:


Stretched out:


Run away!

rig-a-rig-a-rabbit

To the tune of Ring Around the Rosie:

Rig a random rabbit;
make naming joints a habit;
if you didn't orient,
they all fall down!


(alternate ending: if you didn't orient... well, you're f*#%d!)




Legs are fine. Arms are fine (fingers to be dealt with later, need be). Tail is fine. Neck is... hopefully fine. Spine is ANNOYING. He's too bendy for his own good. I'm just not super comfortable with spline IK, but it should be alright as long as I deal with the clusters correctly...

I think I'm just going to give the ears a few controllers. Don't want to mess with more splines and clusters, so it'll just be rotating the joints. Eh, should be fine. I wasn't totally sure what to do with the neck, since it's nearly as flexible as the back and needs to be able to puff out when crouched down/bunched up, but also stretch forward and out when running quickly. I added an RPsolver IK as you would ordinarily use in any old character from the neck to the head joint, but I left one more joint between those two so it's more flexible and has a little reactive bend in it. It's all under the head controller circle. Seems OK so far. We'll see...