totally cool. they remind me of powerpuff girls
the rig sounds awesome, though i didn't understand much of what you said (i'm just starting to get into rigging)
i like the simplicity of your creations. even the brief glimpses of what i saw of the figaro project

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Cogito, Ergo Sum

well man I'm officially intrigued. have you got a short film in mind or something? Nice character designs!! love the style. I've literally just started to get into Maya and I'm happy to say that I'm really really liking it, after tweaking the interface with about 20 different scripts I've managed to get most of the max style stuff that is missing and its making the transition much smoother. Maya just has so much control, I never realised just how much more powerfull things can be in a node based package (well I probably did and was just scared of change ). I know that you can get both programs to do practically anything you can imagine but my brain some how finds the maya rigging workflow alot more comprehensible due to its flexibilty. So far ive made one model and I've just managed a basic rig for my caveboy character (modelled in max) with IK arms and legs and some control objects. I may have a few maya questions for you in the coming weeks if you don't mind...

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yeah ask away i'll be happy to answer. I've found maya so much better for rigging and animation, i dont know it just clicks with my brain. I think the beauty of maya is you can throw in a million scripts and make it the way you want it and it sounds like you have. everyone I know has a their own shelves set up or their own shortcut keys or whatever, I dont know anyone who uses it straight out of the box.

as for my characters, I'm planning on using them for a series of very short skits maybe 10 - 20 seconds long with very simple stories. I liken them to a one panel comic but in animated form. i'm glad people like the designs, I was obsessing over them. I got really caught up in trying to make them appealing. I went to a pixar animation workshop last year and they stressed appeal at all times. My characters design went through a lot of changes at one point they were little robots, they've come a long way.

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and it's a story that might bore you, but you don't have to listen, because I always knew it was going to be like that.

That must have been an interesting workshop. what other stuff did you take away from the lecture?.
I havent really started animating yet. I had a small play with it during my course but initially its a bit confusing. Its like you have to be quite
precise and key things very carefully one attribute at a time. do you have any tips or words of advice about animating in maya?.
I'm kind of lazy and generally just use auto key alot of the time in max. So far I figure you would generally set it up so all your controls only have the attributes you want to key on them and then maybe use the shift+w,e,and r shortcuts for setting keyframes but i'm guessing there are alot of different ways to approach it in maya.

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the workshop was awesome. it covered tons of stuff like the animation principles, which i knew but it was really helpful hearing a pixar animator (andrew gordon) go through them and with examples from the films. Um he also covered different animation workflows and acting, but what really clicked with me was how much detail they animated in the face and eyes. things like eye darts, which i had never done before but now i wonder how i ever made a decent animation without them. um what else? animating the eyelids to follow the direction of the eyes, making the eyelids act like flesh, making them appear to be sticky or have some drag as they open and close and pupil dilation. also making the eyebrows move with the directions of the eyes and and eyelids. a big thing was making the face appear to be working as a whole fleshy mass instead of a rigid 3d rig. And I could probably go on. unfortunatly at work I rarely have the time to implement all this detail. it really sucks knowing you could push an animation so much further if you had the time

as for my maya animation workflow - I open up the script editor then select every control a character has, the script editor records all these actions actions as "select -r armIK;" for example. I then highlight all the relevant lines of script and drag it onto the shelf. This makes an easy character select button. So I pose my character, hit my button and hit s to key every available channel on every control and then move onto the next pose and repeat. I do have auto key on but I always key everything to keep it organised. as the animation progresses you can go in and delete unwanted keys or offset them or do whatever you want. so thats how I do it but you can also look into character sets, I dont know too much about them though.

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and it's a story that might bore you, but you don't have to listen, because I always knew it was going to be like that.

Great info Matt, if been getting into animation a lot more lately, and Maya is one of the things I'd like to explore. I've actually been doing an angel/demon thing myself strangely enough.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

wow, totally love the characters... and the face test! Oh my.

Arg. so. damned. good.

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Gee Greenslade [Link to www.missgee.net]

thanks all. working on a set for the characters now, argghhh i hate modeling sets.

i'd be keen to see your demon and angel project. i'd be curious too see another interpretation, obviously mines flat out cartoony.

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and it's a story that might bore you, but you don't have to listen, because I always knew it was going to be like that.

Yeh, mines pretty cartoony as well. I've been doing an incubator type thing at Monkeystack for the past few months and they've been pushing me pretty strongly down the animation path which is cool as it's something I enjoy doing but haven't really done a heap of in the past. This project's a mock ad for an energy drink called Devil Juice. I haven't really done much facial animation as the character design they gave me doesn't have any eyes, they just wanted me to concetrate on telling the story through strong poses. I haven't done a final render yet and I don't really want to post a viewport preview so I'll just post a couple of stills for now. I'm trying to render it while working on another project so hopefully I'll have it done by next week some time.

I'll have to chew your ear about some good maya animation and rigging tutes some time as other than monkeystack I think everyone else in Adelaide uses Maya.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

they look cool. its weird, they def look like they should be jumping around all over the place hyper on energy drinks, especially the demon. dont know why though haha

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and it's a story that might bore you, but you don't have to listen, because I always knew it was going to be like that.

Great work Matt! Very engaging characters!

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Please support us and post a [Link to www.digitalartsfront.com] on your website.

--Matt

Cool... would you mind If I call the pinky one...

InsaneDevil

InsaneAngel for the other one

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Started Max last September 2008

Jovanie_
[Link to www.facebook.com]!/album.php?aid=6649&id=1820454800

"To forgive a woman's lie is a man's duty!!"

Ok, heres a question for Matt. I took your advice and looked into the ribbon spine. After staining my brain till I felt some of it ooze from my ears I finally managed to build a working ribbon spine setup but Now I'm having trouble figuring out what is the proper way to connect it into the rig. I have a hip joint and Ik legs
and I figured I would link the base spine control to the hip and the top spine control to the neck but of course then you dont get the desired result because the whole thing just stretches around. anyway I finished the ribbon at about 2 this morning so I havent done any messing around with it but I thought I'd just ask the expert and scoop up my liquefied brains while I wait for a response.

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haha yeah they are tough to build but now that you've done it once you can use it over and over and imported it into you scenes as you need it.

now as to how to connect it too your rig, well assuming your ribbon setup is the same as mine here goes.

My ribbon is part of a broken hierarchy with chest joints and hip joints connected to it through simple parenting and constraints. Now i pretty much reversed engineered this from the figaro rig we had. um I have locators at the top and bottom of my ribbon spine which control the translation and squash and stretch. the top locator control I parented under a second locator which is parented and point snapped under a chest joint followed by the neck, head or whatever. the bottom ribbon loactor control is parented under another locator which is then parented under the root joint followed by the hip joint which then leads to the legs. I have the chest, root and hip joints constrained to nurbs curve controls. and thats about it, I hope that makes sense if it doesn't just reply here and i'll see if i can make it clearer. or I can send you my setup file and you can have a look at what i did.

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and it's a story that might bore you, but you don't have to listen, because I always knew it was going to be like that.

Thanks man, yeah I'll have to try it out when I get home but if you could upload an example of your rig it would be very helpfull. I'm just not quite sure how to get the whole spine to move with the hips and not just stretch out leaving the top of the spine behind. If the top locator is the parent of the neck joint (indirectly) and the bottom locator is the child of the hips how do you get the whole spine to move normally when you dont want it to be stretchy? As in if you move the hips the top locator will stay put making the spine stretch down right?. Sorry if this is staring me in the face. like I say I havent had a good look at it yet.

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[Link to www.easy-share.com] i've included my ribbon spine just incase my setups different than yours and a quick mockup rig i made. also, hopefully you can open my files they were made in maya 2009 but i saved them as .ma so hopefully its all good.

now if i understand your problem it sounds like you should constrain the neck and hips joints to controls and then parent the neck control to the hip or root or whatever hierarchy you want. so the hip will control the whole thing like an fk spine but then you can move the neck around and offset the middle of the ribbon like an IK spine.

I'm not even sure thats solving you problem, this is so tough to explain using only text. so here is how mine is setup and hopefully when you open it, it will all become clear.

< >= parent to
headJNT > NeckJNT > ChestJNT < chestLocator < ribbonTopLocator ribbonMidJNT ribbonBottomLocator > hipsLocator > RootJNT <hipsJNT < LegIK_JNTS

then I have nurbs controls driving the joints using parent constraints. the nurbs curves are then parented in this hierarchy.

head CTRL> neckCTRL> ChestCTRL > rootCTRL < HipCTRL

for the ribbonSpineMidJNT I Parented the shape node of a nurbs controller to the joint. this kind of tricks maya that the curve is part of the joint which moves with the ribbon anyway based on the way the ribbon is setup. if you dont know what that means let me know.

hopefully you understand what i'm trying to explain, this is complex stuff and not easily explained using just text

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and it's a story that might bore you, but you don't have to listen, because I always knew it was going to be like that.

Awesome man! I think the penny just dropped. very good explanation. Thanks very much.
I'll grab that rig and have a look anyway but i think I know what to do now. This is pretty much the hardest stuff in 3d. I wish I had a bigger brain sometimes but I was never particularly clever when it comes to stuff like this. I kind of learn a good way and then copy it over and over. I couldnt really get creative with it. Still I much prefer to animate with a rig I completely understand having built it myself.
Thanks again. I'll post something when I'm done

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whew! glad you got it and i'd be keen to see the rig when your done. If your feeling adventurous you can replace the neck joint with another ribbon so you can stretch the neck and head out. its done using the same parent locator constraint setup so not much of a stretch.

I agree rigging is the hardest stuff and my brain just isn't wired for it. I've always thought, rigging is to mathematics as animating is to fine art. everything i know about rigging i've stolen from other people and tutorial vids and like you now that i've learnt it i'm going to copy it over and over. i'm not clever enough to come up with this stuff myself haha.

good luck!

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and it's a story that might bore you, but you don't have to listen, because I always knew it was going to be like that.

I totally agree with that comment. Rigging is all about problem solving and thinking technically while animation is more about feeling and emotion. I think animation is probably the least technical element of 3d which is probably why I enjoy it so much.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]