Squirrely (almost) first pass...

Good progress today. I'll spend a good bit of tomorrow putting some elbow grease to it and then send it to render to get the old reel ready. He's a fun little character. Looking forward to seeing what other folks do with him after I release him:)

Blocking done...

On to linear on Monday. Have a great weekend all:)

Squirrely Obstacle Course Continued...

Been working on 3dizing the Squirrely test. Overall, pretty happy with the rig and plan on releasing version 1.0 after I'm done with the demo reel. He was designed as a 'ball type' character for tests and is serving that purpose well:) Still on stepped keys, hoping to get through the segment's "3dizing" by tomorrow so I can shift to linear early next week. We'll see how it goes. The wife and I are heading out to bowl here in a few so I'm out. I wish I could bowl as well in real life as I do on the Wii. Ah well...

Lip Sync Pause

It's close to done. Gonna give it a few days to settle and then swing back before throwing the reel together. All comments welcome. On to Squirrely!

Lip sync progress

Another day on the scene. Well, partial day. Making good progress though it's still in the "funky" phase when things don't quite look right. In the spirit of showing process if anyone cares to see. :)

Lip sync update and GREAT books...

First off, here's an update on where I was on my lip sync earlier this afternoon. It's coming along alright. I've been working on an in progress cut of my reel and am pretty happy with how that's looking. Need to do a bunch of stuff to finish it but what else is new. Plan on sending reels out in a couple of weeks. Going to be looking for short term onsite work, remote/freelance work so we'll see how that pans out. After the reel goes out I'm gonna work on a 2d project with a buddy at Portland Studios while I wait for responses. Two fantastic books came out recently and I highly recommend them both. I got one of them a couple of weeks ago and the first volume came in last week. They're amazing and worth their weight in gold to anyone not at a studio with drawing classes or in college anymore for that matter. Buy them now.

Blake Rig and Script Jobs...

note - NOT my rig creation

Came across a new rig on Highend 3d and it's a pretty good looking rig. So I decided to use it for the lip sync piece I'm fixing to start on. It makes use of script jobs which don't seem to like referencing as the creator notes in the docs on the site. So I did some noodling and figured out how to make it work. If the character is referenced (all nodes prefix option) to "Ch1:", this is how to make the rig work.

1. Fix the Expression
   • Go to the expression editor
   • Select the "CH1:blake_FKIKSpaceSwitch_scriptNode"
   • Input "CH1:" in the spot provided
2. Fix the script jobs
   • For each character, you'll need to run this is in the script editor: scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch.FK_IK_Match" "LArmFKIK"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch.FK_IK_Match" "RArmFKIK"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch.FK_IK_Match" "LLegFKIK"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch.FK_IK_Match" "RLegFKIK"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch.parent" "LArmSpace"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch.parent" "RArmSpace"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch.parent" "LLegSpace"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch.parent" "RLegSpace"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_tie_ikFK_switch.parent" "TieSpace";
3. Notepad is your friend for additional characters - see Find and Replace
4. Ran into an issue with referencing that the rig maker was kinda enough to help out with. You'll need to create a new script set to fuction on (Open/Close) and set the name spaces: proc multipleChars() { // prefix for character1 string $character1= "CH1:"; // prefix for character2 string $character2 = "CH2:"; // prefix for character3 string $character3 = "CH3:"; // prefix for character4 string $character4 = "CH4:"; string $a[] = `ls -sl`; if (($a[0] == ($character1+"blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character1+"blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character1+"blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character1+"blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character1+"blake_tie_ikFK_switch"))) { scriptNode -executeBefore ($character1+"blake_FKIK_SpaceSwitch_scriptNode"); } else if (($a[0] == ($character2+"blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character2+"blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character2+"blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character2+"blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character2+"blake_tie_ikFK_switch"))) { scriptNode -executeBefore ($character2+"blake_FKIK_SpaceSwitch_scriptNode"); } else if (($a[0] == ($character3+"blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character3+"blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character3+"blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character3+"blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character3+"blake_tie_ikFK_switch"))) { scriptNode -executeBefore ($character3+"blake_FKIK_SpaceSwitch_scriptNode"); } else if (($a[0] == ($character4+"blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character4+"blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character4+"blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character4+"blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character4+"blake_tie_ikFK_switch"))) { scriptNode -executeBefore ($character4+"blake_FKIK_SpaceSwitch_scriptNode"); } } scriptJob -killWithScene -e "SelectionChanged" "multipleChars";

That outa do it. Thanks Jason for the great rig and the help trouble shooting the referencing issue!