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.