The character rig was a complicated process. I think it started off really well with the initial skeleton placement + control constraints but it became complicated when I needed to fix the eyes on my character. Mike and Alec pointed out that my previous model of the rigs would be difficult to easily animate as they weren’t spheres and that could rotate like how we expect an eye would. Mike went through how to use a lattice deformer on a sphere object, then parenting an aim constraint from a locator/nurb shape to the sphere mesh. I managed to get this somewhat working after a bit of trial and error. I wasn’t sure how to duplicate the new eye I created so it would mirror on the other side. I managed to copy it onto the other side by using the normal duplicate tool and changing the Scale X to -1. While this technically worked, a single locator controlled both eyes, meaning they couldn’t be animated independently from each other. It also limited the range of movement the eyes had, as when the character looked to the left or right he would look really strange. At this point, he could only look up and down.
I wasn’t happy with this at all and thought there must be a way of fixing this. I watched a few videos on creating cartoon eyes in Maya using lattices and these were the ones I watched:
The second video was successful in helping me fix my issue, I learned that once you have made your lattice cartoon eye, you need to go into the settings of the duplicate special tool and tick the Duplicate Input Graph box. My eyes were finally working as intended. However, despite parenting the eye groups to the character mesh group in the outliner, the master control I set up wasn’t taking the eyes with it and was causing the eyes to move off into space. The helmet object wasn’t moving with the rest of the rig either. Alec helped me with fixing these issues as the eyes were receiving double transform inputs. We unparented the eye groups from the rig, redid the lattice deform technique then used a parent constraint from the root joint of the skeleton onto the eye group. The helmet was also constrained in the same way. I did try to have a squash and stretch control but this was before I was able to fix the eye problem, and it was making the problem with the eyes worse so I decided to scrap it, mostly because of time constraints and I thought we could get by without it. Alec also suggested that I split up my rig hierarchy into three groups instead of everything being parented under the master control. I think this made more sense/less complicated.
Fixing the skin weights on my rig was surprisingly simple and straightforward. I did have another problem with the lattice points on the eyes somehow being affected by the skin but I was able to fix this by selecting the points and changing the weight value of the root body joint to have full 100% influence on the lattice, stopping them from being deformed by the rest of the controls.
How to remove influences from joints on a part of a model you don’t want to be moving.
byu/Bob2-15-2 inMaya
I was finally able to move onto adding blendshapes for the emotions I wanted my character rig to have.
With the limited amount of time I had left to complete my parts of the project, I did the blendshapes very quickly, but I am really happy with the range of emotions my character has. Following Mike’s tutorials on blackboard and the bit of extra research I did online really helped with getting enough understanding of them to add them in on time for getting to the character animation stage of production.
Final Rig Animation/Movement Test