Week Seven: More Coding, More Rigging! (And a little bit of VisDev)

I've been working on getting a quick and dirty Make Joints Dynamic tool out the door this past week. While I still wouldn't consider it finalized, it was working well enough that I could start experimenting with how to incorporate it into the rig.

I designed the tool to work across multiple selected joint chains, since the models that need dynamics incorporated all have multiple pieces that need to be made dynamic. For the main character, all her hair pieces need to follow her movement-and that'd be a pain for the animators to deal with all on their own.

For a breakdown of what's going on in the video:

• The tool starts with a UI that indicates whether the user wants to name the controls or use the names of the joints as a default option. 
• At least one joint must be selected for the UI to work properly. This works on multiple hierarchies, so selecting the base joint of multiple joint chains is still effective.
• The tool creates two separate joint chains beyond the one selected: the FK chain, and the Dynamic chain. The user has the option to weight the bind chain (the originally selected chain) purely to one or the other, or keep it halfway between the two. 
• It also creates one overarching Dynamics control. This has attributes on it like Start Curve Attract, Drag, Gravity, etc. that control those attributes across every single joint chain that the tool affected. 
• A weakness of this tool is that you cannot build multiple chains within it that you wish to act differently. They would have to be built separately, with their own master Dynamics controls.

Here are two examples with it built into the Treetle rig:

The first is simple movement without any settings changed. 

The second is with an attribute call "Turbulence" activated. This gives off the illusion of wind in a typical joint chain, but with the Treetle, it seemed to make it almost look alive. 

I still have a ways to go with the dynamics to make it viable for the animators to use, but I'm getting there!

For VisDev, I just took the Treetle and broke it down more thoroughly for the model. Here's some of what I've done so far: 

I took Adrian's head shape turnarounds and made them a bit more organic, so they'd fit onto the rest of the body. Then I went over it piece by piece, indicated where the pieces that'll be moving need to go and how they need to be structured to avoid any gaps. 

The full turnaround is still in progress, but I broke down the parts that make up the main body of the Treetle. How the back needs to be structured for animation, how the legs come out of the body, and so on. The lack of symmetry is going to be a pain for both the modeler and me as a rigger, but ultimately I believe it'll be pretty awesome looking and the asymmetry will give it character.