Nelly Luckett : BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts, UCA Rochester

This is the initial version of the front rigging and skinning for Ellie. She needs to have corrective blend shapes to fix some of the issues with her and fill some gaps but overall she looks good so far.  This is what the front and back rigs look like side on. The distance between the sections of the rig is due to the spacing requirements for 2D animation, to ensure that planes don't collide.  This is the side view rig, with the arm located behind the body. I hope to get the rest of the views basic skinned tomorrow so I can move onto corrective blend shapes and then facial rigging.

We had another moom speed posing task today. I made yet another really difficult choice for myself. This was the image I used and the initial 5 minute pose. Although the pose I put Moom into wasn't necessarily the exact same as the pose, it was better given Moom's limitations. There were a couple of little issues; the hands were too far back to support the upper body. The heels were also at too dramatic of an angle. I corrected these. IK/FK Switch In the main lesson we were learning how to create an IK/FK switch to move between different types of controls in order to allow different types of animation. This required thinking about the controls in different ways. One was using an IK (like an elastic band) and the other was FK (individually controlling joints). We then created an on off switch to control these behaviours, allowing different types of animation to take place in the same model.  This is the skinned model, showing the IK controls and the hierarchy...

Today we were working on more relationship nodes for rigging, particularly squash and stretch. We started off the session with completing the ribbon spine that we created during the Jet Pack Jones tutorials, however this was never completed as part of this process as it requires a deeper understanding of rigging than we had at that time. This shows the node relationships that are used to create the changes in volume of the torso when it is stretched or squashed. We then moved on to a tutorial that explains how to have knees and elbows work efficiently without using a pole vector to stop them from flipping backwards. This will be very useful for any uncomplicated characters who do not require full rigging as it obviously reduces rigging time, but also animation required for each character in terms of these elements. This is the node network for the custom attribute created to control the knee behaviour. Sadly we didn't have Moom speed posing this week, however I...