Post 49 - Joint Facial Rig Evaluation

THE MAYA RIG IS DONE.

I have added some final touches such as the following:


- Skinning tweaked as right shoulder had 0.05% influence on the chin (which was a weight painting accident)


- Bicep pole vector influence was not equal on both sides, so bicep pole vectors re-done


- A third hip manipulator has been created so that The main one moves all, the middle rotates the hips and the smaller one moves all but the hands (if an animation sequence required the hands to be in the same position, such as holding onto a railing). These have now been parented to the main one so that when the main one is moved, the other two move with it. 


I am very pleased with the results of my Maya rig. It demonstrates a different fundamental strategy, which uses joints. This system very good and is similar to the systems seen in the games industry. This is because it uses real time manipulation of the joints and is a direct connection. In other words it does not rely on blend shapes for the majority of it's features and so takes up much less memory. It is a versatile rig as the advanced setting allows for individual points to be animated on all axis. I have enjoyed this process and have successfully shown that using a mixture of joints and blend 'corrective' shapes can work well. This rig also has the most elaborate user interface which incorporates a lot of key driven manipulations.


There are a implications with this joint based Maya system. The main one is the work around needed for naming mirrored blend shapes, plus the fact that you can't seem to be able to key frame a motion in order to record a driven key as it relies to an extent on the key frame on the time slider. This is quite a big flaw for me and although there is a work around, it would be much easier to use the same pipeline as 3ds Max. In addition, there were a number of occasions where being able to animate a particular controller or joint has been impossible due to a parenting issue. These have been resolved, but any which have not would simply need to be re-parented to a similar item (for example, the eye controllers can be parented to the neck rather than the spine).


However, this is a good system and one which I would like to look further into in the future.








Final Maya rig demo - LINK