The other part of my job

All the stuff I mentioned in the previous post is part of the job I've kind of had to take handling the animation pipeline. There's just no one else to handle that.

Those familiar with Motion Builder might wonder why we're exporting skeletons. The answer is simple: It's a safety check. The director has signed off the performance in Motion Builder. By having the MB skeleton, it provides a visual cross reference as proof that the performance of the Control/IK version of the character is a 1:1 match with the approved performance when there's no divergence between the two skeletons, except maybe small spacial differences between dissimilar rigs used in the mocap process. Even so, when there's time the most recent version of the character is "characterized" in MB, so the match is pretty close to start with.

But here's an example of how far astray this process can go: We had a scene mocapped with an early version of the character, and that pipeline skipped Motion Builder entirely. So all the hand animation done on top of the mocap was done in Maya. The system I came up with works with that as well. Even though in the latest version of this particular character, the rotations on the bones have been zeroed and realigned, the control structure is entirely different, and even the locations of the joints has changed. So part of the job of my conversion system is to take legacy animation and load the most recent versions of a character with that legacy animation. It's a really useful hat trick.

OK, which brings me to the job I was actually hired to do: rigging. Lately I've been working on a facial rig architecture, that doesn't depend on blend shapes. I had to try a lot of things and burn them to the ground, because every one of them had some annoying pathology. 6.5 doesn't have the ability to paint weights on wrap or wire deformers, and influence objects give me a little more control over weight assignment, at least for the whole curve I'm using for deformation. It was pretty hard to figure out how to get the rotational information of the curves to be picked up by the object when the character is reoriented, but it was only hard because I had no idea what I was doing at first ;)

But there are lots of other little issues that need solving. Things that should be cloth simmed won't be, like a character's leather jacket. Leather isn't like other kinds of cloth, and it presents special challenges. Fortunately, I have about 10 leather jackets to use as reference.

Another is the typical problem of the shoulder area. It isn't hard to defeat some of the problems, but some of the actors who were used in the mocap sessions are [i]limber[\n]. Human limitations weren't a concern to them, and I have to accommodate the exceptional flexibility of a contortionist. As my supervisor says, "Fun, fun, fun". I'll probably be using influence objects a lot to create a selective "muscle system" where these problems occur. I've also got overlapping joints to accommodate controlled twist, a finger control system that accommodates mocapped finger data but lets you animate on top of it and a lot of little tweak controls that will let an animator or TD solve all sorts of problems with the character's, most of whom are not human proportioned.

One of the things I have to deal with, is that with all these multiple characters, I can't use scriptJobs to pull off some of the character TD's magic tricks. I'm working on ways around that. But at least I've now boiled the rigging process down to a "one button operation" for the main controls, connections, constraints and expressions. The face and assorted compensation controls are the only part that has to be done by hand.

It's all getting pretty exciting. At least in that way that a TD's job can be exciting.