Week 10’s lecture introduced us to Blender’s shape key tools and how to add drivers that could control said shape keys. Shape keys are used to temporarily change the scale and proportions of a mesh in an organised format that can be easily reset to its former scale very easily. This tool was immensely useful for my character model as it would be required to have an extremely exaggerated amount of squash and stretch which was for one scene in the animated short which my character is sucked up by the fox Rumba. My shape keys were relatively simple, consisting of a simple shape key that squashed my mesh down completely and stretched the ears to give off the illusion of being vacuumed up by the Roomba. By far the most difficult part of this process was the installation of the driver for the shape key so that it can easily be applied while the animation is in production. The driver was a simple armature with the main bone being used as the controller having a limited location constraint applied and with a view port custom item applied which in this case was a simple cross empty to act as the main driver the hardest part was editing the driver to make it work properly and move the shape key the correct way but eventually after multiple attempts at removing and re-adding the driver and trying different solutions, the driver will not pull the shape key in the correct direction and cause the mesh to squash down how I intended.

 

Week 8’s lecture consisted of a continuation at the different techniques that could be used for rigging models for use in animation, this time it was using armatures to rig said characters.

This technique was the only rigging style that I was familiar with prior to starting the course but I was slightly unsure of how its done effectively. this lecture gave me an insight to some of the key fundamentals when rigging character models with armatures including Master controls, IK bones, bone constraints, weight painting etc. The entire lecture was quite useful in teaching me how rigging in the way works and I personally believe that this technique would work the best with character designs my group and had designed.

With Previs process wrapped up on our animated production, week 7 primary revolved around us learning the fundamentals of rigging characters and assets in Blender. In week 7’s lecture I was introduced to some of the ways to rig and and control object movements in Blender.

The first fundamental that I learned about were empties and how they can be combined and used to create controllers to move an rotate other objects without interfering with said meshes.

After the introduction to the use of empties, the entire class was given a challenge to repair a pre-rigged set of robotic arms which had their controllers all messed up, our task was to identify each problem and repair them, I found this task to be quite challenging at first  but after taking some more time to understand how controllers and rigs function correctly, I was able to finally able to repair it.

The second exercise was even harder, we had to develop a working rig for a water wheel that had been pre-made, The specifications for this exercise included: the Wheel’s rotation had to be controlled by an empty being used as a controller, all the buckets must rotate with the wheel correctly and the entire water wheel can be moved and rotated without the animation being messed up. This challenge was even more difficult and require much more though, trial and error. But eventually I managed to get the water wheel to work correctly with all the requirements. This is still an aspect I want to improve with and get into the habit of using empties to rig objects instead of directly manipulating meshes when animating in Blender.