After a long silence, some news!

Good day!

It has been a very long time since I have updated my blog, for several reasons that didn´t allow me to, so it definitely is time for an update regarding my movie.

I finished the character, Flint. He had another name, but I just fancied this one a bit more. I am not very good modelling characters and building this one ground up, I learned a lot of things that I will have to have better consideration for in the future. Things like the topology in twisting parts of the body, joints that need to be better thought about, so that in the skinning process, achieving good deformations becomes much more simple.

It was a great challenge to find a suitable way to rig my character according to the control that i desired to have on him. I started by trying out 3DS Max biped, however the fact that the bones are the controllers for them selves made me look for something else. 

It was a great challenge to find a suitable way to rig my character according to the control that i desired to have on him. I started by trying out 3DS Max biped, however the fact that the bones are the controllers for them selves made me look for something else. 

I then decided to try the CAT rig system inside Max. It was all working well, apart from a "few" annoying bugs like changing the position of the hand control and suddenly having the leg snap to an awkward position, completely undesired. It was bearable, but counter productive. What really made me decide not to use was when i decided to use the arm, and forearm twist on the rig, so i could have more control over the deformations. The rig would just behave in weird ways, and would make Max crash several times, and then it became clear that I needed to build my own custom rig. 

With this in mind, I searched, gathered and studied information from the internets, and was able to produce a very good rig in my opinion, that offers a lot of control over the character. Things like having a foot roll done with controls instead of commands. Or even having a spine with squash and stretch, that brings something extra if the character is cartoon like, twist bones to help deformations, ik fk blending... I lost time doing it but it was well worth the effort. And as a plus I learned a lot in an area that I was not very comfortable in.

If I had more time I would have remodeled the character, and used bones to rig the face as well. Morph targets are ok and cut it for this one, but I would have preferred the control one gets with rigging the face.

I will soon post about the scenarios and props.

Cheers.