Animation Brad

So, I’m still working on face features of the birdy rig. The cheeks and brows are working on both sides. Then this happens.I’m guessing this isn’t good.

Today I finished up on the Right eye shapes. I spent some time refining the brow shapes and the cheeks just weren’t cool enough. Now these are all attached on the Right side and working great!! Theres a lot of great control and variety available to the animator. Whooo!!! Now the Left side….

So with the holiday behind things on birdy can fly forward. All of the mouth shapes are now fixed to my liking, so the character should make some great combinations to do dialog. I found this script and it rules for making mirrored heads. the transition to the other side of the head was a […]

The jaw seems to be working now.

The mouth is going to need a lot of attention to get the shapes right for dialog. The lower lip itself is going to need another 6 controls. Then the eyes need rigging and controls for the lids, the other brows need to be built in and the tongue. […]

Ok, so the next step is creating blend shapes. For those of you that aren’t familiar, these are entirely separate heads that have to be created for face controls. Each control needs at least two heads.

the blue heads in the image are used for the three controls that move the right brow up and down.

Today […]

yea!! Well the mirroring process was a bigger pain than I thought. When building the left wing, I did not take very good notes, as I should have. I missed a few constraints, including one that I had to attach to my IK/fk switch to get the orient correct. It’s not perfect, but it’s looking […]

So I was thinking with the part I have from the mirrored Left arm, I could spin them around and the re-attach things to get the right for the wing.This didn’t work. So I ripped out everything -well most everything- and started again and got all the way through until this buggar happened. One main […]

Well, mirroring the rig is a bigger chore than I thought it would be. I popped through the legs ok, but the wings are a nightmare!!!!! I guess this blog wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining to my 3 readers if everything went smoothly and ended up working great. Look at this.. constraint hell.

After rigging up the wings, adding joints to the legs seems easy.

I went and skinned the shoulder to the joints. That should stop the big gaping hole I was getting. Attaching the wing parts has been difficult. I think I’m stuck. So I moved on to the tail. Similar to the ‘finger’ feathers, the tail feathers can now curl, twist, lengthen, lean and do all kinds […]

Working out individual bends and twists for finger type joints takes a bit of time. Fortunately some scripts are speeding up this process. This is fun though! You can start to see the combination of shapes that the animator might use.

Going back and remaking the entire wing again was fun. But totally worth it. Now I’ve got 16 joints across the front to get the right kinds of curves I want. So Saturday was spent fixing that. Today I’ve been working out the feather joints. Admittedly, I’m making this harder on myself than it could […]

Well, it took some doing, about five or six practice rigs and a lot of sweat. Now I am able to bend and stretch the wings. I had to modify some theory from one place and apply it to another, but it looks like everything will work. yea!!! Birdy can now bend his arms […]

I’ve been working on building a rough version of what the wings might do when I rig them. Basically, I’ve rigged everything there and tried out stuff to see what works without wrecking the rig i already have. Then when it works, hope that I took good enough notes to do it again on the […]

This weekend I sat down and reworked the spine. Having done this a a number of times before, things are working much cleaner and more precisely. The neck turns much cleaner and I get a great range of movement on the spine. yey!!