For the last 2 months i've been rigging the characters ready for animation. This has been a very long and complex task for which I have needed to learn some new techniques and solve many problems to get the characters to work. I wanted to put in loads of detail for this part to bring the characters to life in the most realistic way with all bells and whistles turned on.
I decided to use the standard biped rig for both characters because this is a rig i'm familiar with, it is highly flexible and easy to use. After this project I am considering reusing the characters and rigging them up in maya which is one of the most used animation software in the games industry to expand my skill set and make me more employable.
To rig the cape I have been learning a bit about rope simulation to try and animate this part procedurally to save time. If I had to animate the cape by hand it would take me forever and I could never get it to flow like cloth. By using several chains of bones linked by constraints I will be able to focus on the character animation and bake this part afterwards. I did consider using cloth simulation but thought it would be more relevant to games if I used bones.
For the horse rig I needed to look at references for the anatomy of a horse to get this part right. Because it is a mammal and has all the same bones as a human, the biped can be used to rig this character by simply rotating and scaling the bones into the right position. I also swapped some of the geometry out for more horse like features to make it look more pleasing and match the horse mesh proportions better. Similar to the cape I set up the reins using a chain of bones linked together that will be procedurally generated.
For the rope simulation to interact correctly with the characters I have needed to cut up and position collision boxes that are attached to the individual bones so that reins and cape have something to bounce off of when physics is applied.
What has taken the vast majority of my time to rig has been the face. This is a highly complicated bone rig predominantly set up using position and rotation constraints referencing point helpers. Each shape the face can create is saved out with a list of position and rotation constraints linked to a GUI using reaction manager. The bones and helpers are set up in a hierarchy with a root bone linked to the biped head. Furthermore, I have designed this rig to be scalable, with each bone and helper editable so that it can be skinned to another mesh. Because the animation is saved in the GUI, it can be transferred from one mesh to another by saving out an XML file. I don't plan on testing this out for this project but next time I do an animation project in 3dsmax I will reuse this rig to save time.
The rig can produce many different facial expressions and lip shapes by combining the GUI controls. Aswell as all the main vismemes that Jason Osipa describes in his book Stop Staring, it is also capable of making basic expressions that will I will be incorporating into my animation to give the human more personality. I am also considering finding an appropriate audio clip that can demonstrate this rig more effectively in my showreel.
Finally, I have been testing out lighting in 3dsmax. I want my showreel to really stand out and display my work at a high quality so I am prepared to spend some time rendering out quality lighting after I finish animation. This video demonstrates ambient occlusion using the light tracer, with the character performing some of the test poses I have been using to skin the mesh to the rig.
I now plan to spend the next 2 months animating both characters together in a range of different scenarios. I need to put in the most effort for this part as I am an animator, this is my chief skill and needs to be at a high standard. I expect to finish the project towards the end of May.
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