Testing a new Autorigging system...

A classical pose...for a troll...?

Note - This'll prolly be the last update on Olaf for a bit. Some major forks in the road are quickly approaching - 1) I'm getting married in a couple of weeks , 2) Moving to Houston, 3) Transitioning to a freelance/contractor from being an employee so it's gonna be a "wee" crazy. Crazy good that is!

I've been playing with John Doublestein's autorigging system the last two nights and I have to say it's pretty awesome. John works with my buddy Dave and we're using his rig for Dave's film. I hadn't realized a bunch of the neat little features workin so far on the film. He's got some great little right click menus that get built when you rig a character that snap between fk and ik.

You can play with the rig on a character by downloading the Andy Rig on that same page. Some neat stuff I noticed on that version that aren't in the autorigger that I'm planning on implementing to Olaf:

• Squash and stretch through the spine using scale. Prolly will do that in other places too
• An extra curl on the hand that allows that pinky and ring finger base bones in the hand bend for a proper fist.
  

Couple of things I noticed with the rig:

• Some of the systems don't work properly in Maya 2008 - namely the right click menu
• Speaking of Maya 2008, the new smooth skin weights feature is awesome. I saw it in a Austin 3d user group meeting a couple months back and had been dying to play with it.
  
• Joint placement and orientation is critical but this matters regardless of what rig you're using. Having the ability to quickly try out joint placement by quickly adding an arm rig and a default skinning is a great boon to the work flow.
• That workflow allowed me to identify problem areas - I updated Olaf's tail and made major adjustments to the hands
  

What's next for Olaf?

• Facial Rig - This is where I wanna spend some time over the next...well while...got a bunch of things I wanna try. I'm planning on blogging that process pretty well so tune back in if you're interested.
  
• Tail Rig - at some point I'll have to rig his tail, but it'll be a bit
• Animation - That's really the whole point....:)
  

Also....
Fingers are a pain in the rear to model well so that the proportions work to "roll the finger" on itself. If anyone knows a good tutorial or book on the subject, by all means let me know.

Olaf is approved for Rigging...

Can you believe how different this looks from the last?

Heard back from Cory this morning and Olaf has been approved for a dose of skelegro. The main difference from the last one is a head shrinkage surgery that Olaf came marching through like a champ. I actually did a first pass on modeling his teeth last night. Don't they look great!?

Hey, if you don't have X-ray vision don't blame me.

Been working some renders for a side project at night which detracted me from much Olaf progress. It's been a fun little project. Hope to wrap that up tonight.

Waiting on a rig from Dave to get started on my next shot for his film. Can't wait till he announces it and I can stop referring to it as "Dave's film" or "Dave's Project." Get on it, Dave!

Olaf, Come FORTH!

So, I finally got off my keyster, put down the video games and books and am working on Olaf again.

One of the things that has frustrated me personally so much in CG is that it takes sooooooooo long to get a fully realized character ready to animate on. Lately I've been looking at quite a few available rigs on which to animate on. There's some great ones out there, but I've been wanting to animate Olaf for quite some time AND I need to get some reel stuff ready. As animation is what I wanna work on right now and not cloth dynamics nor the fat jiggle settings for the rear end of a troll, I came up with a temp idea on Olaf - throw a low res animation body on him, rig up his face, and voila!

I really don't know why I didn't think of this before. It makes a lot of sense, especially in cg where proportion of the arms, fingers and all are so vital. Dumb it way down on a simple structure to see if it's working.

When I started this time, I made some mods to the proportions to make him a little closer to the young and spry versions of the character my buddy drew. I'll see what he says and go from there.

Side note - it's amazing how good one feels when doing those things which one is passionate about...almost like putting high octane in a sports car. Like we're doing something we're made for. Not that I consider myself a sports car...more like a Civic. LX, not EX - I'm not that flashy.

Olaf needed a body

So I spent this evening on giving him one...much to do still, but making good progress. It was a good excuse to play with the new Silo 2 beta which, I must say, rocks the Casbah!

The Ca...troll..ogre-thingy in the Hat

His hat is pretty close to done (sans texturing). I've been staying late at work late the past week cause my carpool friend has had to be around. It's been good time to focus on Olaf here. Next, I think I'm gonna start blocking out his body. However, this weekend, I've gotta do another promotional thing with Tiko. For that, a Hawaiian shirt is in order...Aloha. Other than that, this weekend will be comprised of getting ready for a trip to OKC next week and my cousin and his girlfriend are coming over for dinner on Sunday. For that, I'm making some of my creamy pesto pasta and some home made ice cream. Should be fun. Out.

Not as much progress as I wanted...

But still got a good ways in. More importantly, I learned how to properly use Silo's topology brush...wow. Talk about sweet. Here's Olaf's template hat. I wanna get some feed back from Cory before I really get into details. Hopefully we can touch base later today (it's almost 1am now). Today was a pretty good day, I got up and went for a nice little 4 mile jog in some nasty humidity. After I worked out, I headed to church, then headed to Texas Roadhouse for lunch cause I felt like some steak. I used to eat at one in Savannah, and they just put one in about 3 blocks from my apartment complex, so I thought I'd give this one a shot to see if it was as good as I remembered. It was. After that I headed to the bike store cause my buddy said they were having a sale. We've been riding bikes together some and he'd been harping on me to get some real biker shorts. Now, as I was growing up, biker shorts just meant spandex. However, he told me that they have actual padding in the shorts (kinda like a mini pillow woven into the tight-tastic material). So, I picked up a pair and some shades on sale (half off, baby!) and headed to the grocery store. When I finally got home, I decided my new shorts needed a trial run and listened to that stupid little voice again for another 17 mile trek. The humidity was gone by then and it was actually a really nice ride. This evening has pretty much been hanging out with Olaf and my attempted "sewing" attempts for his hat. Much to do. But for now, it's bed time.

Time for bed Olaf....

After I got in this evening, I spent a bit of time relaxing, then got back to working on getting Olaf some bug protection for those speedy motorcycle rides. For the most part, I think they're there (but there's always room for improvements). Tomorrow...or later today rather....I'm gonna work on his hat so he doesn't get sunburned!

Good day so far...

Started off this mornin' with at 17 mile ride. I had no intention of going that far, that stupid little voice just kept saying, "Just a little bit further before you turn around....just a little more." Ah, well. Beautiful weather out. Did a few tweaks on Olaf this afternoon and did a quick planning concept from which to do his hat and goggles. I love this character, he's gonna be so much fun to animate. Gotta head out...

Little update...

Worked till about 2 last night on Olaf trying to really capture Cory's tweaks. I think it's alot closer but still have some tweaking to do. However, it's a beautiful day out, and time for a bike ride... Be back later.

Minor Olaf Updateage...

Cory was kind enough to take a look at the latest tweaks and do a paint over with this fixes. Hopefully this weekend will see his head done intact with hat and goggles...can't wait to get started:)

Olaf Day 2

Made some good progress tonight...just plucking along. I hope to have the head at least rudimentary done by this weekend. Time for bed...

Starting Olaf...

First things first, I started Olaf this weekend. I started off by installing Lightwave 9 since I hadn't had a chance to play with it while I was finishing the last gig (done in 8.5 and didn't wanna jinx things). I'm enjoying it. The new edge tools are great and I love the new 4+point sub-d's. Bout time. I think I'm still gonna pick up Silo which I've been playing with at work in my downtime. It's a great mix of Maya and Lightwave modeling to me and is hard to beat for $100. Anyways...so, on Saturday afternoon, I started by taking a hard look at Cory's drawings and trying to get a feel for what that would look like in 3d. Illustrators tend to not worry so much about staying "on model" when they do their illustrations. They're more concerned with the single image then a consistent moving one, so I tried to pick out the key facial landmarks I could. I did some of my own quick studies to try and get a hand on it, drew some quick modeling images and started up. I spent most of last night on starting to model while also refamiliarizing myself with modeling again. I've not really done any serious modeling in some time...especially character modeling. I looked at it this morning before heading to church and saw the utter crap that it was and decided to start over when I got home. After church, I picked up some modeling clay and spent a good bit of this afternoon experimenting with Olaf's head "in the round". When I was satisfied I had a better understanding (and convinced of the feableness of my sculpting abilities), I started again. The above image is where I'm at. LONG way to go, but can't wait to have this character ready to move around. He's gonna be a ball to animate. Many thanks again to Cory for letting me give him a CG breath of life:)