Baboon Rigging

After lots of trial and error on Pete, rigging and skinning the baboon only took about a day! I rigged him in the T position as he will need to both run like a quadruped and stand like a biped, he will also need the use of his hands. As his arms are longer than his legs, running like a quadruped shouldn't take a specialised rig.

I've decided against the use of blend shapes as there is very little dialogue. Instead, I will be using the method of 'facial rigging'. For the baboon I will create joints for the jaw and the eyebrows. For Pete I will do his jaw using joints and his eyelids using clusters. For each of these I will create controllers, linked by driven keys or parenting, that are easy to use and clear as to what they do.

Eyebrow controllers...




Inside the eyebrow is a joint (separate to the main rig). The eyebrow is connected to these joints by a smooth bind. Parent constrained (translation only) to each joint is a controller. These controllers are in turn parented to the head joint so that they move correctly when using the head squash and stretch. The head squash and stretch is another useful feature of the auto rig. :)


To test the rig I made a run cycle. Which pointed a few problem areas out which I went back and fixed.

• I hadn't parented the jaw controllers to the head control, so while they moved with the main controller, they didn't move when rotating or translating the head.
• I hadn't parented the tail controllers to the pelvis control. so while they moved with the main controller, they didn't move when rotating or translating the pelvis.
• I hadn't parented the butt correctly so it wouldn't scale uniformly with the rest of the model using the main controller.
  
• The neck creased when rotating ans translating it up and back so I smoothed out the skin weights a bit more there.
• I hadn't frozen the transformations on one of the eyebrows so it could not be easily set back to its default position, I had to remove the constraints to the head joint temporarily and put them back after freezing.

With these all fixed I could animate the run-cycle with no problems.



I think the movement looks correct but it's perhaps a bit slow for a run.

Pete setbacks

When testing Pete's rig, lots of things were going wrong, earlier in the rigging process I'd deleted some of the controllers as they didn't seem to do anything. now I discover that they were to do with proper rotation of the back. Also the model wouldn't scale or rotate properly by using the main controller. his head would stay in one position while the rest moved. I knew the rig was capable of uniform scaling as I could scale the baboon, but something was definitely wrong with Pete's rig.

I decided the best method would be to delete the rig and re-do it. Though I wasted a day on this, I don't mind as it means I will have a stable and reliable character to work with while animating. The skin weights are also improved as my work flow is a lot more efficient now I've had a lot of practice. Before re-skinning I will work on blendshapes for pete's eyes as my previous cluster method doesn't work.