August 2007

rigging woes!

Roshanak’s hair really gave us prob­lems until at the end we used tails for their ani­ma­tion. I found a post on XSI­Base that helped me over­come the issue.

Surf’s Up!

For you enthu­si­asts out there, there is a link posted on 185vfx.com to a pdf that is a Sig­graph paper on the mak­ing of the Surf’s Up documentary.

It is extremely inter­est­ing for those who want to have a clearer idea of what is going on behind the scenes of big pro­duc­tions and what pipelines they use

Surf’s Up!

For you enthu­si­asts out there, there is a link posted on 185vfx.com to a pdf that is a Sig­graph paper on the mak­ing of the Surf’s Up documentary.

It is extremely inter­est­ing for those who want to have a clearer idea of what is going on behind the scenes of big pro­duc­tions and what pipelines they use

rigging problems

Due to lack of time the main prob­lems we encoun­tered dur­ing the rig­ging and ani­ma­tion process were two main issues:

1– Cre­at­ing a solid enve­lope that would not break dur­ing the animation

2– Cre­at­ing believ­able move­ments for hair and clothings.

For the first one, our lead ani­ma­tor, Saman Khor­ram who was charged with the ani­ma­tion of the main char­ac­ter Roshank, decided to forgo the pri­mary rig and cre­ate one of his one which would be more sta­ble and easy to work with, and took care of the envelop­ing so that it wouldn’t cre­ate any prob­lems dur­ing animation.

Our other ani­ma­tor, Farhad Youssefi, decided to stay with the pri­mary rigs and ani­mated the father and the mother.

rigging

Our rigs were exten­sively based on rig tuto­ri­als we had obtained from 3D Tuto­r­ial and 3DQuakers.

Adam Sale’s rig­ging tuto­ri­als are truly excel­lent and give detailed expla­na­tions on all aspects of the workflow.

Char­bel Koueik’s Rig­ging Pro, Script­ing 101 & Auto­matic Rig­ging are a must for any inter­me­di­ate TD try­ing to get a grip on script­ing and rigging.

Charbel’s tuto­ri­als do not include any facial rig­ging so we used dif­fer­ent ideas from both workflows.

Characters’ Shading

We’ve been really swamped with work so we haven’t been able to make any updates until today.

This is a pre­view of the final shad­ing for the main characters.