Helping Other Teams

Throughout the semester i was trying to get work from other teams to see if i could challenge myself more when it comes to rigging. Luckily some teams were in need of a hand with there own characters. I managed to get work from 3 out of the 5 other teams in the room.

Group 1

The first group to approach me were Katie, Nadine,Shelley and Rachel. They had a biped child that needed to be rigged at relatively short notice. I was given the rig and went about building a simple biped rig as i was instructed that the character didn’t need to do anything extreme when it comes to animation. In the end i went with a simple IK/FK control for the arms and legs, no stretch built in as it was not necessary for the animation. everything else was the same as Kimmy only less developed due to their lesser animation than our own.

Group 2

The second time which i helped out on was the sea house project of Dan, Ryan, Beth and Nathan. This wasn’t much work as the team had already chososen to use a Mixamo rig for there character but due to some issues with weight painting and maintaining volume. I also adjust a lot of controls that were bugging Dan when trying to animate due to their scale.

Above shows the issues before my alterations. Below shows the deformations after my corrections. Sadly i didn’t have enough time to do a complete overhaul on the rig as other deadlines were fast approaching but i managed to get the necessary fixes done to allow for some better hand animation.

Group 3

Another team that asked if i could help them out was the PTSD group of James, Aiden, Daryl and Charlie. At first they needed a train rig to allow handles to swing within their game. I set this up with a master control to allow for all handles to swing at once, this was then put through an expression to offset each handle so they don’t look as stiff and robotic. The next step was to develop a system to allow each handle to move by itself if needed, similar to how i set up the previous rigs finger tweak controls i just hierarchy of joints to develop controls to move each handle independently.

The second rig i was asked to develop was a headless biped male rig to allow the VR user to have a body if they looked down. The rig itself was meant to be very primitive and allow for simple idle animation while the game was running.

 

Sadly due to time constraints and issues these never made it into their version.