ThomasMahler
05-05-2008, 08:56 PM
Hope nobody bothers that I open this thread here and report presumably 'old' news, but I think it's a shame that the Anzovin stuff never got the proper attention on CGTalk, even though The Setup Machine and Face Machine are probably the best plug-ins I've seen in years. And years. And years.
Now, Rigging and Weighting in general always has been this huge pain in the ass task - it's one of those things in CG that need artists to shovel lots of technical information into their brains and it's just tons and tons of work.
I know when I worked on my first shortfilm, rigging and setting up characters took up LOTS of time, especially if you haven't properly done it before.
So, after like 30 minutes of reading the pdf and giving it a shot, I had a completely usable face rig - the autoweighting worked like a treat and the only problem area was around the eyes (though I probably didn't set the curves on the lids correctly, so I'll try it again tomorrow). So I had nice deformations, like sliding lips across teeth, lids that move smoothly when the eyeballs are rotated, sliding skin all around the face and so on and so on. The control panel for the face is very much Osipa-inspired, which seems to be the standard for facial rigging nowadays anyway. Here's a screenie of one of my characters, Berny, that I rigged during looking through the docs:
http://www.thomasmahler.com/images/Berny_Rig_01.jpg
The controls feel really intuitive and I really think this stuff is _perfect_ for small studios, students and any production with tight deadlines that needs some complex facial animation.
Big thumbs up from me for everyone at Anzovin, hope stuff like that will be integrated sooner or later in our animation packages.
Make sure you head over to the Anzovin Website ( http://www.anzovin.com/products/tsm2maya.html ) to check it out. And no, I'm not being paid by them to write this, which should be an indication about how excited I am to have this stuff at my hands now.
Kudos to Anzovin and everyone involved, big recommendation from my side!
Now, Rigging and Weighting in general always has been this huge pain in the ass task - it's one of those things in CG that need artists to shovel lots of technical information into their brains and it's just tons and tons of work.
I know when I worked on my first shortfilm, rigging and setting up characters took up LOTS of time, especially if you haven't properly done it before.
So, after like 30 minutes of reading the pdf and giving it a shot, I had a completely usable face rig - the autoweighting worked like a treat and the only problem area was around the eyes (though I probably didn't set the curves on the lids correctly, so I'll try it again tomorrow). So I had nice deformations, like sliding lips across teeth, lids that move smoothly when the eyeballs are rotated, sliding skin all around the face and so on and so on. The control panel for the face is very much Osipa-inspired, which seems to be the standard for facial rigging nowadays anyway. Here's a screenie of one of my characters, Berny, that I rigged during looking through the docs:
http://www.thomasmahler.com/images/Berny_Rig_01.jpg
The controls feel really intuitive and I really think this stuff is _perfect_ for small studios, students and any production with tight deadlines that needs some complex facial animation.
Big thumbs up from me for everyone at Anzovin, hope stuff like that will be integrated sooner or later in our animation packages.
Make sure you head over to the Anzovin Website ( http://www.anzovin.com/products/tsm2maya.html ) to check it out. And no, I'm not being paid by them to write this, which should be an indication about how excited I am to have this stuff at my hands now.
Kudos to Anzovin and everyone involved, big recommendation from my side!