Thinkin bout spines...
Python training is coming along well. At least Bokser hasn't gotten the switch out yet. Started into classes yesterday and they're pretty amazing. Progress is humming along on the "skeleton" of bbThingamarig. Bokser must have had a late night and I have no new python assignments for the morning so in the meantime I thought some r&d would be fitting.
So spines are tricky things. For starters, I'm not thrilled with Morphy's current spine as I've said before and it's one of my major issues with the rig as a whole. That's something I plan on rectifying. And how!
In keeping with Master Schleifer's instruction, the first thing to do is to think. Why don't I like morphy's spine, how it might be better, and look at some other spines out there.
- Pivots - for starters my pivots are off. I had a version at the end for the testers that was much better but it was gonna add a good bit of work to roll in and I'd rather just do it from scratch.
- Reverse spine - I've been playing with a prototype spine from my good friend Scott Englert that uses it and it's an intriguing concept
- Extra channels - another buddy, Tony Bonilla asked for an extra rotation transform on the cog to deal with spins so that's something I wanna do as well.
- FK/IK blend or more of a mode system - Some rigs go for a strictly fk/ik spine (TSM comes to mind) with a switch while others go for a more hybrid approach (which Morphy's current rig is). At this point I'm leaning towards one or the other with snapping between the two but I'm definitely open to suggestion
- Ribbon spine - Seen this bandied about some so I'm lookin into this as well courtesy of Aaron Holly's "Rigging for Feature Animation"
- Any further suggestions for things to look into?
Labels:
Rigging
3 comments:
Hey Josh,
If you do look into the ribbon spine setup from Aaron Holly, you should also check out my blog. I have an entry where I took his setup a step further to allow you to rotate the spine indefinitely without it flipping on you at the 180's. It may be of use.
-Sean
http://animandmel.blogspot.com/
Hi Josh! I did a few days ago a little script in MEL (I'm still learning MEL) to make a ribbon spine with squash/stretch.
It's already scalable and have squash/stretch but I'm still working in some features such as controlling the amout of squash and FK blend.
Take a look: http://vimeo.com/18440031
I'll be glad to receive any coment and maybe contribute with Morpheus!
See ya!
Thanks Sean, I'll take a look at that. Hope you're well, my friend.
Ze Alexandre, thanks as well I'll take a look.
I definitely see some pluses on the ribbon spine side and I'll be interested to see if other TD's have overcome some of the limitations as I look at it more.
I think my biggest issue was in not separating the non squishy pelvic "girdle" and sternum when thinking about the spine in my planning and thinking.
Progress is good on the python front, workin on template objects now and made my first child class yesterday. So neat! :)
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