Mend Me Blog

I have done some tests and looks like my idea will work. Though I didn’t anticipate the attention needed on the axis of rotation for the eyelids as it changes the character completely.

Sleepy monster

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After playing with the IK finger setup it became apparent that this was going to be veryy irritating to animate with as it is hard to see where the target bone is and take multiple-angle change in the 3D viewport to get it in the right spot. After searching around I found a conference given about the character rig and particularly the hand rigging in Elephants Dream. The setup was to have each finger as an IK but then parent the target to the end of one big bone that stretches the length of the finger. This then means that there is one easy to use bone to control each finger as its rotation controls the rotation of the finger and by scaling it it can contract or expand the length of the IK chain thus bending or extending the finger – perfect! (more…)

After much nashing of teeth and failed attempts to mimick other rigs I finally got a root-role system that seems to work. The problem with the Ludwig model is that it seems to use actions to get the foot to role and although it works very well I can’t help but feel this is somehow cheating and that the logic of the armature should be able to perform the functions needed without programing an animation based on the action of a bone.

Finally getting stuck into the kid rig. It’s taken a while to figure out a way to handle the arm-elbow roll issue amoung other things. And I am not particularly looking forward to rigging the face either…

After doing the first scene with the butterfly I learnt that it is important to be able to hide the armature or at least only have the controlling bones visible. I wasn’t able to hide the armature with the way that I made the library link and missed a few frames where a leg knuckle intersected with the wing.

The monster rig will have only the controller bones visible and the other bones on a separate layer.

Well I have an idea for making glowing red eyes for the monster as that freaks me out. I’ll use a material with a full emit value and then model eyelids that cover it. The plan is to then parent lights to the monsters head and in the best case scenario the eylids block the light. If that doesn’t work then I can just automate the lights to turn on. The glowing part can be taken care of in the compositor. We shall see…

Given that there are a lot of elements to the creature I wanted to reduce the armature down to as few controller bones as possible so that it is easy to animate but still fluid and believable. To achieve this everything was an IK chain with limited rotations on each bone. To be honest I am surprised how well this rig functions given the apparent complexity yet very few controllers. (more…)

After many trials I finally got what I wanted for the specularity on the butterfly. It shimmers a hint of the thousands of tiny short hairs that coat a butterfly’s wings. My first try I used the noise filter in Blender as a spec pass; what I didn’t realise was that this animates, making the wings look like they had film grain. When I painted a texture, paying more attention to details, it didn’t really work as the light needed to be quite high for there to be any effect and in the actual scene the wings had a flat specularity. After playing with the setting and discovering that I could map the image to “colour specularity” I got the shimmer I wanted. Plus the bloody thing doesn’t sparkle.

Original noise for spec

Image crafted spec

I had some feedback from different people that the head on the monster is too “cute”. My main design concept is for the head to be the same head (which it is) as the butterfly and I do not mind the “cute” so much as the monster itself is seen through the perspective of the little boy. It is a figment of his imagination so elements of “cuteness” aren’t necessarily outside the design specification.

The butterfly represents the landmark achievement of learning basic UV unwraping and materials in Blender. I started with looking at specularity and eventually added a normal map though I do admit that at this stage it is trial and error. One problem that became apparent only after I rendering a sequence was that the noise channel seemed to be moving. Since this was mapped to specularity it meant that when the wings bent into the like they looked like they were sparkling film grain.

butterflySparkle.mov