Rigging my charatcers

Although my dancer is mainly stationary, she eventually moves her legs at the very end of the animation meaning that she did need a full basic rig. The only difference was that her arms are in a fixed position. As a dancer every position that she will move into has a curved arm, and trying to stick to the toy aspect i have applied this to her body. Even though they are fixed she still maintains a rotational ball and socket joint at the shoulder, allowing her to lift and circle them. Another point to add is that she does not have movable fingers, like a doll/barbie so she does not have finger joints. Below is the rig so far, I'm just finishing off the arms but at the moment all the controls work and it is a successful rig.




I have also been working on my Jack in the box spring, i took some serious notes from Alan and was able to remake the spring he demonstrated. A few things to add here is that the texture is temporary at the moment, it is comprised of a projected U ramp shader, wrapped around the object in a cylindrical manner, but as the spring will be moving i had to create a texture reference object to keep the texture from morphing. I'm not sure if i will use this texture like i said but for the moment it is allowing me to check that everything is working correctly. It has also been the firs time that i have used ncloth in Maya to get the material effect that i wanted. When i had imagined my jack in the box springing out, i had imagined the cloth around the spring stretching, but just as it stretches it would also need to fold and 'wobble' before it goes back inside. The preference setting for this effect that, at the moment is working OK, is 'chiffon'.







Alan suggested to create shapes and parent them to my joints so allow a quicker less memory consuming preview of what my spring is doing and so the above imge is showing this.


I will hopefully spend tomorrow binding my dancer, and finish off my jack in the box's rig enabling me to bind jack on sunday. Today im off to work til late - gr.

Dancer

I've also been working on the dancer. My first attempt at her, left her legs to long her waist to tiny and her head to big. I re visited my sketches and made some alterations to the way i had modeled her. I made her legs larger, from the thigh to the foot as i was working from the proportions given by the head from my orthograph, and i had accidentally made her feet tiny! i then realised her knee was too low so i raised her knee and gave more shape to the entire size of the leg. I also changer the dress. Before the dress was too long and the waist was too small plus i had made her chest area too large so decreased this too.


BEFORE:




AFTER:

Face developments:

......just remembered!

My colour palette had changed slightly since i last took a look at my dancers music box and so there needed to be some changes made to its colour scheme. I decided to give my dancer and the jack in the box a very primary theme, but slightly more washed out then usual. Their surrounding in the toy shop are very bright and plain and i wanted there to be a contrast but not make them look like they came from too entirely different worlds. My dancer is wearing green and had red hair - opposite to the blue eyed blond haired barbies near by to their sale display. Deciding this i needed to update my music box. The textures need some further development but the over all colour scheme is closer so what i want.

Clown and dancer face developments

Further modelling

Dancer:







(i had only just started on the arm - please ignore!)






Jack:




Barbie: