Improving the Rig

I've spent quite a lot of the time this term fixing problems and improving aspects of the rig.

The first glitch I went to fix was a problem with the right jowl. When the control for this was moved upwards for a snarl it would cause the whole joint to flip 90 degrees for some reason. The flipping problem was only apparent on the right hand side although the deformation on both jowls wasn't quite right; they would become slightly flat when the head was tilted upwards.

Here's a video of the problem:

The flipping problem was caused by the right jowl joint having a strange default rotation value of 180, 180, 180. This made it look complete normal while it was in fact flipped (I have no idea how that happened or how I missed it). This strange rotation cause the aim constraint to flip over when the joint hit a certain angle.

The way I fixed it was that I changed the values back to 0, 0, 0 and then made them controlled through IK handles instead of aim constraints. This fixed both the flipping problem and the slightly off deformation when the head was angled.

Here's how the improvement looks:

The next thing I did was improve the IK controls in the legs. Previously the leg was positioned using a controller around the foot and then the wrist rotation was controlled separately with an FK control. This setup was quite unintuitive as I found out while animating the walk and run cycles last semester: I had to position the foot and then separately adjust the wrist/ankle angle which then caused the foot to change height and position on the floor and then required a readjustment of the IK control to correct the position.

Here's a demonstration:

Ideally I wanted both IK control and rotational control of the feet in a single control so I could position the foot and have it pivot around the base when I added rotation. The way I got this to work was I added another IK handle to the joint nearest the floor (the equivalent of the ball of the foot on a human) and made it sticky. I then grouped this new IK handle with the original one at the heel/wrist and made the group a child of the control curve.

Here's the result:

This control setup is much more preferable to the previous one.

The next problem was to do with scaling the rig. There were some glitches left behind from last semester to do with scaling in relation to the muscles. I thought I had dealt with this by connecting the 'tiger scale' attribute into the 'user scale' of the muscles but this appears only to influence the size of the NURBS objects which make up the muscles and not their weighted influence on the mesh.

The result of this is pretty weird...

This was a fairly simple fix but it took a bit of searching to find the right attribute to connect to. Here's the scaling working properly:

After that I noticed that the deformation around the shoulder and scapular areas was really quite off. Here's what I mean:

This was a case of editing the weights in these areas (NOT fun).

After a lot of tedious work I ended up with some much better deformation and some easier-to-select Pole Vector curves:

I might see if I can make the deformation even better but so far I'm fairly happy with the way it's working.

That's all for now. More updates soon.