After last week’s skeleton placement the time has come to enable a intuitive control over said skeleton. It would be very cumbersome to be forces to animate every bone in the character by hand.

I used  what is called NURBS curves in Autodesk Maya to enable me to circumvent this problem and create Control objects for the skeleton rig, using tutorials online and a book I found called the art of rigging. I found this site particularly insightful: https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse460/05sp/links/Rigging/basic_character.html

While not rigging a humanoid character the basic principle is the same.

Placing the control objects to correspond with the part of the skeleton that I want to control it.

The most challenging part with creating a control rig is how to place the constraints between the Control object and the skeleton. But once I figured it out it is actually quite logical. The NURBS are placed in a hierarchy beside the skeleton so that the objects lower in the hierarchy follow the ones higher up thus maintaining their relative positioning to each other.

Then using point constrain and orient constrain to lock the into place to the joint.

The only difference is the stretch control. This one has a parent constraint instead because it is the only control that uses scaling as the desired control method while the other ones uses Rotation and Translation.

Another thing to make it easier to control is using ikHandles between joints. This creates a “rubber band” between the joint so that the lower joint in the hierarchy controls the ones higher up. Imagine a humanoid arm. Without the ik the arm has o be animated by first moving the shoulder, the the elbow and lastly the arm. With ik enabeled the animator just has to move the hand and the rest of the arm will follow.

The finished result may look intimidating but it is better that the alternative.

The time has come to participate in a course where I can actually make a game and not just graphics for one. That is something I have felt is lacking the last few months.

I am working on a game that is so far called SpaceGoo Adventures. It is about three? slime creatures with different abilities traversing a world to find parts for their broken teleporterthingie. It is a 3D plattformer collectathon reminicent of old Nintendo 64 games like Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie.

My job is to breathe lif into these characters through animation. The last graphics course of my education focused on 3D character animation and there we used Motion Builder. Since the character for this game are slimes it is not preferrable to use Motion Builder since it is mainly for humanoid character. Thus I had to figure out how to rig and animate in Autodesk Maya.

As with all animation you need something to animate so I started out creating one of the characters dubbed “Hoppy” for his special ability to double jump. Just a basic round blob. My team is going for a low poly aesthetic so I do not have that many polygons to work with.

This is Hoppy.

First I had to figure out what kind of range of movement I wanted out of this critter. So I sat down and experimented with the configuration of the skeleton. I want him to be able to squash and stretch and wiggle to sell that he is made from slime.

Controllig the different edge loops and the eyes and what I call a hinge joint in the middle for the squash and stretch.

To be able to make him wider or thinner I created this shape. All of the arms will eventually be controlled with ikHandles.

Here we have the finished skeleton where all of the edgeloops can be controlled to make Hoppy wider or thinner as need arises. I will probably realize later that I missed something in this process since I have never done it before. But that is why I am here, to learn.