gagex2z
02-25-2012, 04:17 PM
Hello, I'm a 2d/3d animator/rigger. I started out as an animator but in the process of trying to find cool stuff to animate I have become somewhat of a rigger.
Having said that I hesitate to call myself TD yet in any capacity due to two gaping holes in my skill sets. Please keep in mind I am a total beginniner. I graduated from school having been trained as a generalist with some understanding of the maya interface. We never even opened a copy of 3ds max or xsi while there. There was a motionbuilder class taught but I had to choose between drawing for animators III and that class. I chose to try to improve my 2d base. After that semester the instructor left, and that class was never offered again. Thus, I am competent with Maya, Zbrush, and photoshop only.
My TD instruction in school was limited to the basic reverse foot set up, and settign up IK arms and legs with blendshape morph target's for facial.
Since graduating, I have trained myself with professor google and read as many of these type of cg art forums as possible. I have managed to improve all my skills by nearly three times as much as when I was in school, however, the 2 main rigging issues I mentioned earlier have eluded me.
I certainly welcome all advice and critique and if either of these techniques will be usefull in accomplishing what I need to try to do I will do my best to apply the advice however:
1.) I can not script. I don't think I can descibe how much trouble I've had with this. I am not very good at figuring out foriegn languages and I'm a bit of a sloppy typer. I have to go back over everything I type several times to clean it up.
I can not write expressions, I cannot use the mel command line (to do anything more than parent -r-s ; for making my multiple curves one shape node), I only recently figured out how to load, source, and initiate other people's scripts and plug in's and even then, if something breaks I have no way of looking at the script and figuring out how it works. It's a complete foriegn language.
2.) I cannot use utility nodes. This was never taught in school, and I have been unable to find resources simple, and thorough enough to self teach myself anything about the more complex ones. Layered shaders I understand.. color blend.. not really but kinda..
multiply/divide, plusminus average, condition, point on surface, ect.. totally over my head..
I can't tell you how many tutorials I have been following (such as stretchy Ik limbs) that I'm fine until we get to: now make a multiply divide node and a condition node. at this point the tutorial becomes unfollowable and I have to try to look for a more simple method not involving nodes or scripts.
Having made just shy of about 25 character rigs at this point and fought my way trough to achieve far more advanced rig features than I was ever formally taught.. I have come to form a hypothesis.
Character TD's are problem solvers. Far more so than just making control set ups for the animators to use, if the program does something wierd or breaks in some way the director will probably come up tot he TD and say this is broke, fix it, you have 2 hours.. The TD's job then becomes to find out what's causing the problem, then try to figure out how to solve it and if no tool is natively available inside of maya's standard menu, they seem to have the mysterious power to make one from scratch.
Scripting seem's to be able to tell maya exactly what you want it to do in essence creating a tool to help you from scratch. I do not posess this skill and thus, if I want to ever consider the option of TD (which I do enjoy doing) I will need to correct these problems. That's why any assistance anyone can offer in these areas I will glady take and be eteranlly gratefull for.
Having said all of that: I have a current problem. The reason I outlined those issues was so that when giving possible soloutions you would be aware of my limitations. If there are way's to achive the same result's using groups, constraint's, parenting ect. rather than scripts or nodes then those method's would be far more applicable to my current set up.
If in your opinion the only way to acheive the desired effect is through these techniques it might be that that level of control is simply beyond me at this point.
I have a video outlining two of my current questions; the first is not really a problem as it's working for me but I'd like some input on the set up:
the second question, is a rig problem. It involves pinning the elbow to a point and having it rotate around that area in addition to the standard pole vector control.
The basic set up is: one locator acts as a pole vector that's sitting out about 40 units in Z from the elbow.
The other locator is snapped to the elbow and acts as a second pole vector. the weight of the pole vector constraint is controlled by the Ik control's elbow lock attribute.
Now I need to find a way to make the snap pole vector follow the position of the elbow joint. This is what causes the cycle.
I have tried:
using groups to both the elbow joint and the pole vector locator to house the constraint info leaving my original controllers free of transformations.
using the connection editor to have the translate ann rotate of the joint drive the translate of the pole vector.
Using a poly sphere with a skin cluster weighted only to the elbow joint
none of these have worked. The only technique that did not produce a cycle error was the poly sphere method and that had the contraints overriden by the skin cluster input, so the poly vector stopped working altogether.
Please take look at the video below and if anyone has the time to give me some tips I'd really appreciate it.
Also, if anyone has any suggestions on where to go for extremely basic but thorough explanations of what the utility nodes are and how to use them. I think with simple enough info I could figure those out.
I don't see how I'll ever figure scripting out though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzt7vQFt8HA&feature
Having said that I hesitate to call myself TD yet in any capacity due to two gaping holes in my skill sets. Please keep in mind I am a total beginniner. I graduated from school having been trained as a generalist with some understanding of the maya interface. We never even opened a copy of 3ds max or xsi while there. There was a motionbuilder class taught but I had to choose between drawing for animators III and that class. I chose to try to improve my 2d base. After that semester the instructor left, and that class was never offered again. Thus, I am competent with Maya, Zbrush, and photoshop only.
My TD instruction in school was limited to the basic reverse foot set up, and settign up IK arms and legs with blendshape morph target's for facial.
Since graduating, I have trained myself with professor google and read as many of these type of cg art forums as possible. I have managed to improve all my skills by nearly three times as much as when I was in school, however, the 2 main rigging issues I mentioned earlier have eluded me.
I certainly welcome all advice and critique and if either of these techniques will be usefull in accomplishing what I need to try to do I will do my best to apply the advice however:
1.) I can not script. I don't think I can descibe how much trouble I've had with this. I am not very good at figuring out foriegn languages and I'm a bit of a sloppy typer. I have to go back over everything I type several times to clean it up.
I can not write expressions, I cannot use the mel command line (to do anything more than parent -r-s ; for making my multiple curves one shape node), I only recently figured out how to load, source, and initiate other people's scripts and plug in's and even then, if something breaks I have no way of looking at the script and figuring out how it works. It's a complete foriegn language.
2.) I cannot use utility nodes. This was never taught in school, and I have been unable to find resources simple, and thorough enough to self teach myself anything about the more complex ones. Layered shaders I understand.. color blend.. not really but kinda..
multiply/divide, plusminus average, condition, point on surface, ect.. totally over my head..
I can't tell you how many tutorials I have been following (such as stretchy Ik limbs) that I'm fine until we get to: now make a multiply divide node and a condition node. at this point the tutorial becomes unfollowable and I have to try to look for a more simple method not involving nodes or scripts.
Having made just shy of about 25 character rigs at this point and fought my way trough to achieve far more advanced rig features than I was ever formally taught.. I have come to form a hypothesis.
Character TD's are problem solvers. Far more so than just making control set ups for the animators to use, if the program does something wierd or breaks in some way the director will probably come up tot he TD and say this is broke, fix it, you have 2 hours.. The TD's job then becomes to find out what's causing the problem, then try to figure out how to solve it and if no tool is natively available inside of maya's standard menu, they seem to have the mysterious power to make one from scratch.
Scripting seem's to be able to tell maya exactly what you want it to do in essence creating a tool to help you from scratch. I do not posess this skill and thus, if I want to ever consider the option of TD (which I do enjoy doing) I will need to correct these problems. That's why any assistance anyone can offer in these areas I will glady take and be eteranlly gratefull for.
Having said all of that: I have a current problem. The reason I outlined those issues was so that when giving possible soloutions you would be aware of my limitations. If there are way's to achive the same result's using groups, constraint's, parenting ect. rather than scripts or nodes then those method's would be far more applicable to my current set up.
If in your opinion the only way to acheive the desired effect is through these techniques it might be that that level of control is simply beyond me at this point.
I have a video outlining two of my current questions; the first is not really a problem as it's working for me but I'd like some input on the set up:
the second question, is a rig problem. It involves pinning the elbow to a point and having it rotate around that area in addition to the standard pole vector control.
The basic set up is: one locator acts as a pole vector that's sitting out about 40 units in Z from the elbow.
The other locator is snapped to the elbow and acts as a second pole vector. the weight of the pole vector constraint is controlled by the Ik control's elbow lock attribute.
Now I need to find a way to make the snap pole vector follow the position of the elbow joint. This is what causes the cycle.
I have tried:
using groups to both the elbow joint and the pole vector locator to house the constraint info leaving my original controllers free of transformations.
using the connection editor to have the translate ann rotate of the joint drive the translate of the pole vector.
Using a poly sphere with a skin cluster weighted only to the elbow joint
none of these have worked. The only technique that did not produce a cycle error was the poly sphere method and that had the contraints overriden by the skin cluster input, so the poly vector stopped working altogether.
Please take look at the video below and if anyone has the time to give me some tips I'd really appreciate it.
Also, if anyone has any suggestions on where to go for extremely basic but thorough explanations of what the utility nodes are and how to use them. I think with simple enough info I could figure those out.
I don't see how I'll ever figure scripting out though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzt7vQFt8HA&feature