Week 11: Dynamic Fail

I had set up the rig for Styxx and was ready to bind the mesh and paint weights. Before I did I had time to create some facial expressions using blend shapes. Although I didn't create many options, I am happy with the quality and can always go back and create more.

Maya 2018 has the Delta Mush feature embedded in the program, so I used that method to bind the skin. I also used the component editor to mathematically assign more weight to vertices whose corresponding joints bend more sharply (e.g. elbows and fingers).

The next step was rigging the hair; I approached the situation like I was going to rig many tails coming off her head. I split the joint system into upper and lower hair, and tried to keep the joints as minimal as possible, while still achieving nice deformation. In the end all the locks of hair added up to 30 joint chains. Starting from the bottom, I applied IK Spline handles to each joint chain and made their curves dynamic. I also had to make Styxx's body a passive collider so the hair wouldn't fall through. It started off ok, but as I made more and more dynamic curves, the playback reaction time became slower and the hair follicles were far too sensitive:

I tried to simplify the rig by reducing the amounts of joints in some of the longer locks of hair, I tried adjusting the nucleus and hair follicle attributes, to make the hair 'heavier' and less sensitive, I tried deleting some of the locks of hair altogether, but in the end I had little success. If I had more time I would've been able to get around the issues but alas! As a backup plan, I replaced Styxx's 80's glamrock hair with a more manageable ponytail and fringe.

Despite reducing the amount of dynamic rigs from 30 to 6, I still had issues with the sensitivity of the hair follicles; it just didn't make for an appealing animation!

To solve this problem, I tried to make a manual rig; 6 locks of hair wouldn't take too much time to rig/animate. I still encountered some bugs when applying an IK/IK spline system, so I resorted to using a very basic FK system and parented the hair curves/joints to the body rig. It would take longer to animate a natural swing to the hair, but I didn't have time to spend hours and hours trying to fix the previous problems.

Finally I could start animating!

Before I did, I prioritised creating environmental assets for one of my peers with whom I was collaborating. Within 48 hours I modelled, textured and basically rigged trees, bushes, rocks, a ground plane and a bird. I stuck as closely as possible to the brief he provided (inspirational visuals were helpful) and he was quite happy with the results.

He was also in the process of creating bare trees, rocks and a stormy, barren wasteland as an HDR for a sky dome that I would eventually add to my scene.

See you next week!