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...

ssssnakes

I thought it would be worth noting in case someone was antsy. NO, THIS IS NOT HOW MY STORY ENDS!:

 

My rabbit does escape the snake, but we don't really know where he's going instead.

 

Side note, this site is absolutely indispensable when it comes to identifying potential snake or lizard problems in California. We've had our fair share of rattlesnake encounters all up and down the state, though currently my mother is waging war against some particularly territorial western fence lizards in Sonoma. www.californiaherps.com

Here's a really good example of a sidewinding rattlesnake in Arizona. I really like how muscular this snake is. Even though it's moving slowly, you can still see how strong it is.


Decided to go for broke and fully model and rig up the snake. There will be two puppets: one for sidewinding and slithering quickly; one for more articulated poses, strikes, and subtle movements.

Here's a playblast of some quick and exaggerated sidewinding in place. I'm REALLY happy with how this turned out. He still needs his teeth, facial detail, and eyeballs, but I think he still looks pretty menacing anyway! It loops, not sure how to make the player do that automatically...