BWAH

The slow and dull journey of editing the weight values by component mode continues.




Weighting the jaw and the lips always takes the most time. Hopefully I can put in a good days slog tomorrow and get the weighting done, leaving just the set driven keys for the visemes and some basic controls.

Local rotation axes fun times!

Got a little ahead of myself with the weighting and forget to adjust the local rotation axes of the joints of the face rig. I didn't touch the local rotation axes of the joints on Valve's body rig, just what I'm totally hacking in.

Before:


After:


I'm not certain if it's wise to have the local rotation axes the same as the world or if I should have the y axis pointing towards the parent bone. I'm sure I'll find out when this explodes when I try to animate it. In my defence it's not an entirely uneducated decision, through my work I've had the chance to look at some professional face rigs and the local rotatin axes were the same as the world...



On to the weighting.

Progress update

Probably digging myself a hole, but the joints are in place and some minor modeling has been done so it has eyes and eyelids. I may add in a few more edge loops around the mouth so it deforms a bit better. The mouth sack will definitely need an edge loop or two. It's just one poly from lip to top or bottom.

I think with the way Valve structured the files, I',=m going to have to add the nurbs curve controls and possibly the set driven keys for the face rig in the other file. But I'm getting ahead of myself, still have the weighting to do. Wee!

One of the many reasons why Valve is awesome

They provide you with Maya files of their nearly fully rigged characters in your Steam Source SDK dir.



I say nearly fully rigged because the model doesn't include a face rig, but that should be simple enough to take care of.



After some quick rigging and slight modeling changes--eyelids and eyes, maybe a few more edgeloops around the mouth--I'll be able to start doing some animation. Woo!