i have now full completed my zombie rig. I think i have got very nice deformation on a lot of the mesh. using muscles helped me a lot with this rig, i felt they just gave me a lot of extra control that i wouldnt have had otherwise.
i also like how the muscles jiggle when they are animated fast, this gives a really nice effect on the belly of the zombie and i am looking forward to seeing what i can use this for in the future when i create characters and mosters.
i have now completed my facial rig using bones. i much prefered rigging with morph targets than bones as i found it easier to get the deformation i wanted. however i can see to plus sides of using bones as you can just move each bit as much or as little as you want, whereas with morphs you have to change the section of the part you are morphing.
i feel this rig was less successful than my morph rig as the deformations are not as smooth and it took much longer to make
i also implemented sliders for this rig
i have completed my morph target rig now and i am very happy with it. to create the morph targets i just cloned the main mesh then toock it into zbrush and sculpted it into exactly the expression i wanted then sent it back into max and set it as a morph target i really like this way of rigging because you get a lot of control over the mesh as you are sculpting it. you can change it into whatever expression you want in a matter of minutes.
here are the sliders i set up in action.
having the sliders there makes it very easy to quickly animated the mesh.
here is a range of motion test with the rig
i am beginning to get the results i want from the rig. there is still a slot of smoothing out i need to do but its getting there.
these pictures show where i placed my joints when setting up my rig. i used a combination of anatomical diagrams and existing rigs to help me place the joints correctly. i also took into account the edge flow of the mesh so the joints where ligned up with the denser topology for smoother deforming.
above there is also images of the muscles i have put into my rig. i am finding that they greatly improve the accuracy of the deformation. however i am having to work out what muscles to put where through trial and error as putting anatomically correct muscles in doesnt always seem to yeild the best results.
for my facial rig i will be rigging a gorilla bust. i will do one rig using morph targets and another using bones.
so that i can achieve realistic deformation i have been looking at the the anatomy of gorilla heads and researching the sort of expressions they make. i will use this as reference when i make my morph targets.
i have noticed that the brow is very important in their expressions and will be vital to creating realistic deformations.
for the project i also have to create a facial rig.
i have been looking into different ways of facial rigging and it seems very much to be a personal preference thing.
rigging with bones gives the animator more control however i feel that working with morph targets gives much smoother and quicker animations.
there are also many different ways of setting up controls for the face. for my project i think i will use sliders
i came across this today and it blew my mind a bit but it has also made me realise the true importance of muscles in rigging and how, if they are used properly, they can give amazing result.
I am struggling to find a lot of helpful learning material about maya muscle. There are a few basic tutorials around but nothing i cannot find anything that goes into very much detail.
This has been the most useful tutorial as it gave me a starting point and from there i have just been playing around with the muscle builder and working out what the different parameters do
i have now complted the set up of my bone structure and controls. the controls are labelled above.
i have set up driven keys on certain controls like the hands for instance. If i want to animate the hand into a fist there is an attribute i created called fist and all i have to do is turn that up and the hand goes into a fist. I did a similar thing with the feet to create a footroll. This will save a lot of time when animating aswell as giving a nice feel to the motion.
There is an IKFKblend attribute on the wrist controls aswell which allows me to change how i am animating the arms. this was also created using driven keys.
animation and simulation 