FINGER PAINTING · 14 AUGUST 2022
I was thinking that I should try not to get bogged down by working on things other than the animation since that is the biggest task right now. I didn't want to stop to fix things on the rigs or try out a new renderer, convert things to work with Unreal(which I'm thinking of doing), or just anything that gets in the way of progress. However, since I made these rigs so long ago, and even though I've made updates here and there, some things I know I could make better.

When I started working on this again last year, one thing I forgot was that I never made individual finger controls. I basically just have one node per hand that controls each joint. Over the years with work projects, I've learned that I don't really care for that method anymore and prefer to just directly pose each finger control. It can be a bit slower, but is just more flexible overall.
So of course, I decided to spend the weekend adding finger controls to each joint on each character. I've done this before on various projects, and the trick is to leave the current controls in tact so that they don't break existing animations. On the Alien I 100% did that, but for the Robot, I noticed his splay and thumb controls are opposite on the right hand. I could have just left it alone, but that broken mirror really bugs me, so in addition to adding finger contorls, I also fixed the problematic ones on the old system. However, this means I had to make a little script to fix any previous scenes I want to put this rig in. Just a simple script to reverse those animation curves on the controller if they exist, and if not, just reverse the value instead. Not too difficult, and it seems to work on my test scene. I've added a button on the picker to quickly update older scenes but should probably batch convert this to be safe.

Still a few more things to do for the fingers first. I will probably update previous scenes with the new rig version - at least anim scenes. However, I still have to update the picker and create a trasnfer script to zero out the old single node style and put their values on each individual control. That's not 100% essential, but it is nice to have when you go back to an old scene and want to work the "new" way. Technically the new finger ctrls are additive, meaning they can work on top of the old ones like "tweak" ctrls, but that can get very confusing.

Even though I don't want to get bogged down with rig fixes, while I'm at it, I want to add world space switching to the head, neck, and fk arms. Possibly the torso as well.
ANIMATING · 7 AUGUST 2022
Trying to keep this project going. I'm actually retro-writing this entry since I did this work last week. I did a tiny bit in July, adjusting the blocking and fixed a repoNode script that lets me realign the placement node without affecting the controllers, such as world ik, etc. Othewise just did a bit of splining on the Alien character.

I think I mentioned this before, but a lot of this website is super manual entry despite the amount of automation going on. Probably should have made it easier to update these things. Usually I just copy and past bits of html and then adjust them, but it still take a bit of time, especially when I have huge gaps between updates.