Wednesday 5 December 2012

Making Moustache Man Move (Rigging and Weight Painting)


Due to Moustach Man's build the rig had to slightly differ from the ones we'd made for our aliens. For example his arms were so stubby there wasn't really a big need to add a forearm roll.


When weight painting I discovered a problem with the feet, whenever there was any influence on the ankle the foot would bend in, making it quite hard to create any form of Set Driven Keys for the foot control. After attempting to correct it through weight painting the influence on every joint it became obvious I would have to start again and detach the mesh from the rig. I then rebuilt the leg joint chains, this time only having one knee joint instead of two. The leg mesh is so thick and blocky that there is minimal movement in them anyway, so this seemed appropriate. After re-skinning the rig seemed fine.


The Key feature of Moustache Man is his moustache! It was very important that his moustache could emote (since he didn't have a mouth or jaw). By giving him movement on each side and a little on the bottom he is able to snarl and plump up his moustache. Weight painting this was quite fun as it allowed me to add expression to the character - especially when controlling how much of his nose would flare etc.


Another difference to the Alien Rig was giving Moustache Man the ability to point, just by adding another joint chain in the hand for an index finger and then creating a Set Driven Key that would cause the other fingers and thumb to ball into a fist whilst the Index Finger stayed outstretched.

The model of Moustache Man proved a little difficult to weight paint as his blocky solid shape really hinders movement or otherwise causes really noticeable deformations, therefore his movement was slightly limited (for example he didn't have a neck so could barely move his head). However since he is only in the scene for a few seconds and movement isn't that complex (and as he is meant to be blocky it makes sense for his movement as a character to be quite restrained) this isn't a major problem.

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