In class, I watched and followed along with demonstrations and tutorials on different types of Rigs in Maya and how they work. The example below is a tutorial I completed on rigging a tentacle. This taught me how to parent joints so they move alongside the character. Parenting has cause and effect on all the children of the parent joint making actions appear more believable.
We matched the transformations of each control to the joint they would operate. This meant that if the control is moved it could easily be returned to the assigned joint. This tutorial emphasises the importance of organisation. As I am rigging a model that will be used by other animators besides myself it’s important to make the controls and their functions clear and tidy to prevent issues that would slow down production.
Link to One Drive folder with the tentacle I animated following the tutorial Animation Practice
The animatic and Pre-Viz outlined what actions and expressions the character needed to do. I now had to make a rig that would enable the character to move as required.
My lecturer was very helpful and gave me a detailed video on how to Rig my model. Parent constraints were used for the body, Flippers and fin.
The eyeball and eyelid controls use orient constraints which controls the orientation of an object. I used Duplicate special on the Right eye constraints to make the left this time constraining it to the other side.
All controls were parented to the bottom Global control so they would all move in conjunction with the model.
When unwrapping the model’s UV,s I made cuts in the areas that felt most natural to the shape and mostly hidden from the audience. The pufferfish is never seen from behind so all seems are made at the back.
Blend shapes are poses or expressions created by manipulating a character’s mesh. Saving these manipulated shapes as blend shapes stores them to be used and reused speeding up the animation process.
I created 4 expression blend shapes and then linked them to a control with the set driven key applied. This control also manipulates the tongue blend shapes to move in conjunction with the expressions. This enhanced the expressions and prevented the tongue from poking through the mesh. I created a layer for my mesh and locked it so the mesh is not disturbed when animating.
Below shows the final set of blend shapes.
Unfortunately, I did not notice that the paint around the lips smear and If I had more time I could have tested this on the rigged model. The smear is most prominent when she expands. I also regret not keeping the white highlights in her eyes that are commonly seen in old cartoons. I removed the highlights because I was concerned that it would confuse the direction of the character’s eye line and clash with the real lights in the scene.
Whilst animating I discovered a problem with the rendered blown up pufferfish. Its Geometry was stretched too much making it very unappealing and unnatural. Thankfully the rest of the pufferfish rig and blend shapes worked fine and my team members were able to utilize the character in their scenes. For my own scene, I wanted my model to look her best as she puffs up in panic so I went back and edited the old blend shape.
Bellow is the new Blend shape and a link to a One Drive folder with the final Pufferfish model.
Final Puffer Fish Model Rigged
