Monday, 17 November 2008

A small piece about those character problems

I mentioned this briefly in my last post, I don’t want to dribble on here and bore you with this one as I’m sure by now you have had more than enough of the situation (I’m not far off losing the plot over it).

Martin, another member of my group has the rock room to animate and it involves a lot of these characters using various instruments. The drummer’s arms were the culprit here. When raising his arms enough to bash the dead animal skin with a dead part of a tree his under arm would deform in a rather nasty way.

This problem was being caused by the fact that the elbows on the character do not bend and twist in the same direction as a human arm. This is because the mesh is deep but narrow, if the IK (inverse kinematic) was in the same as a human arm there would have stretched too much on one side and crushed in on itself in the other creating a bad pinching effect. In an ideal world we would have solved this problem by detaching the IK, unlinking the character controls (IK’s and bones are linked to them for ease of animation), re-attaching a new IK in a different direction and linking new controls. But it would not end there, no, we would then have had to enter the skin level of the character and changed the vertex weighting of the bones to accommodate for the new direction in movement. As all this is still new(ish) to us it would have been a trial and error process taking up way too much time. To solve this problem we rather ingeniously detached the IK from its elbow control so the mesh could twist a bit closer to what he wanted.
It wasn’t as much control as he would have liked but it was enough for him to be able to complete his work given the short time that remains for this module.

Go on my son.

(After all that, it this post was longwinded, I appear to be unable to write a short blog, and now I’m just making it longer by waffling away here).

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