DON'T FORGET ABOUT ME · 8 SEPTEMBER 2024
I wasn’t going to redo the Teddy as a SkeMesh style rig, but since he was the last character, I figure I should get all 3+ on the same system. His rig was actually the simplest with no extra nulls inserted anywhere except an extra null at the top of the hierarchy chain. Very straightforward to separate from the control rig. Of course, there’s always a hitch. I originally used nurbsSurfaces for him because the Maya fur plugin worked really well with them. However, I discovered today the copyWeights doesn’t seem to work on nurbsSurfaces. At first I thought is was my SuperReSkin64 tool, but turns out it’s just been that way for a while in Maya. Since this character is so simple, I was able to just remove all the controls rename the joints and then save it out as a SkelMesh. I then cleaned out the surfaces from the main file and recombined them. Modified a few control shapes while I was at it. I did add Origin(root) joints to all the character rigs and part of me wants to try some quick export tests into Unreal, but I really don’t want to get too bogged down with that. I’ve already spent over two weekends on this process, and while I feel it was worth it, these are the type of things that prevent the animation from getting done. Still, it’s nice to switch gears every now and then…like for 20+ years!
ONE RIG TO RULE THEM ALL · 7 SEPTEMBER 2024
Way back in the early 2000s, I created an alternate head that I could do some eye movement with. I ended up using it for some animation tests, but not much else. However, when I was adding the new finger controls, I got a bit annoyed with myself that the Mk-II (alternate head version) rig was basically a copy of the Mk-I and I had to extract the head from one file, reattach the head in another, make sure all the controls worked, and basically re-rig it up to a certain point. While it was just the head, I’ve learned enough over the years to know that it could easily just be different skelMesh driven by the same rig, or even just part of the main rig. It’s been driving me nuts, so I decided to just bite the bullet and converted it into a skelMesh head that is now part of the Mk-I rig. A toggle attribute will switch heads and bring up or hide the appropriate controls for both the subD and proxy versions. A bit tedious because this head has lids, iris, and two antennas, but it felt worth it to do at this time. If I end up using Unreal, I’ll export one skelMesh for each version and then have one skeleton work for both since it only has a few extra joints.