Complex Bone Head Rigg Attemp

[GraphicAnime]

Hello,

I am attempting to create a bone rig for the head based on heyvern sample file of the technician. I'm attempting to create a FAN animation based on the japanese singer, Demon Kogure, of the J-Metal Seikima-II.

I completed most bone rig for the chin. I'm working on the nose right now, which I'm having trouble.

I have a few questions. When going through trial and error on the chin, I wanted to smooth out the way corners were moved. I was assigning another bone to the same CP. I thought it was working, until I realized I'm only changing which bone has control of that particular CP.

Can you assign more than one bone to the CP or do the bone's constraints have to be assigned to various bones to smooth out the shape? The setup that I'm attempting is become more complicated as I work on the nose movement.


here are some sample pictures.
The first one is the front view that shows the parenting links.

I moved the mouth to the side for easy rigging.

Here is the side movement of the head, minus the eyes and nose. I wanted to make the gray cheek to stretch more towards the side with secondary bone, but I'm not sure how.


here is the up position, minus nose and eyes.
The bone in red is the MASTER HEAD mover.


I'm open to suggestion on how to go about this. I noticed there are sometimes inconsistencies in the "bone position controller" settings. I would have to readjust the parameters because it was going in the wrong direction. Does this have to do with the direction of the bone itself, the parenting link, or both?

Thanks in advance.

[DarthFurby]

I've never had the courage to try something like this myself. Hopefully one of the forum bone gods will provide some insights.

[Víctor Paredes]

If vern is not posting on the forum for a while, I think there is nobody who could help you. I know vern uses some scripts he wrote specifically for his head, so I don't think it be "just" bones. Maybe Genete could guide you, but I think that this kind of rig can be made only with the mad genius mind of Vern.

I think that a simpler approach is just using blend morph. You will get similar results in less time and all is as simpler as moving points and bones. If you like the idea of moving a bone for turning head, you should take a look to rudiger's bone morph diasls script.

[Genete]

I was in continuous contact with Vern when he develop is 2.5 head rig. He started rigging a mouth what would be as much possible to rotate +/- 45 deg.
The idea is that the bones are in a chain of dependences where the central ones moves more than the right or left ones.
He also uses the springy combination (linear motion based on angular motion) for some of the parts of the head.

During those days I also wrote the 3D rig scripts and lately the poses script. After a lot of time looking for the perfect rig I realized that the holy grail doesn't exits. I've repeated several times that the best rig is the simpler one that let you place the main parts of the pose you want to obtain and adjust the rest of the stuff not achieved by the bones using point motion.
There is not other magic than draw a good set of poses and do a good animatic with the correct timing.

Richard Williams pointed out this when discussing how much do we leave to the assistant?, in his famous Animator Survival Kit:

The long way turns out to be shorter.
Because: something usually goes wrong with some clever rabbit's isea for a short cut and it turns out to take even longer to fix everything when it goes wrong.
I've found it's quicker to just do the work, and certainly more enjoyable because we're on solid ground and not depending on some smart guy's probably half-backed scheme.
And again, if you don't want to do lots of work, what are you doing in animation?

In our case, the assistant is the computer.

-G

[GraphicAnime]

Here is the animated head test of fan animation of demon Kogure (Seikima-ii) using only actions, based on selgin's tutorial.
Currently, the center, left, right and lower left actions were completed.


http://designertek.com/animation_tests/ ... ne-mod.mov

Let me know what you think...

[slowtiger]

Quite impressive, but still it seems to be an odd movement. The pupils seem to move slightly different from the lids, which is distracting. And the ears have a life of their own.

I'd recommend to either use very fast movements when you do a bigger head turn, or in smaller turns (up to 7°) get even slower, so these points get by unnoticed.

[GraphicAnime]

Here is the latest test with more natural movement in the eyes and mouth. I still have a few more face movements to create in the actions (Upper- left and upper right). The hair still doesn't seem quite right.

EDIT: NEW LINK

http://designertek.com/animation_tests/ ... ne-mod.mov


I had to animate the blinking manually. I couldn't create a separate action for "Close Eyes"/ "Open Eye", because distortions of the eye lids would form, where it wouldn't close all the way and the lids would go in the opposite direction. This happened after I used the head turn actions. I think it was because those particular control points were already keyed in?

Thanks...

[super8mm]

Sorry, I don't mybookfacespacetwit.

[GraphicAnime]

Sorry, I don't mybookfacespacetwit.

Sorry about that. I thought the seen by "Everyone" setting would allow anyone to see it. You can try it out now.


http://designertek.com/animation_tests/ ... ne-mod.mov

I edited the last post with this new link as well.

Cheers,

[super8mm]

The blue on the sides of the eyes tend to be thicker further away compared to frame 1 than when close up when his hair tips goes off screen for the first time. 3/4 ways into the clip his hair still moves when his head stops. Hair also tends to grow and shrink. The biggest thing to consider is time invested versus final product.

Once those are fixed it will be good.

[GraphicAnime]

Here is the latest fix of the animated head. I managed to fix most of the hair animation. I used IK bone springs to allow the tips of the hair to sway at the head turned. Currently, the hair is in four layers (front middle piece, left front, right front, and back hair). I may have to change the way I designed the hair because of the issue of keeping track of the keyframing of each hair section.

Here is the link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmK86fc8sFo

In the mean time, I've been busy updating my web site.
http://www.graphicanime.com

Please check out this page. I am showcasing the official teaser which is based on the animation that I've worked with Silent Nemesis Workshop.
http://graphicanime.com/temp_teaser.html