Rig revamp and Face rig

New Year New tweaks

Started revamping assets a few months ago. Builts some cars and beefed up the set. Anything I could do to avoid working on Ebil's model and rig. Finally sat down last week and started slogging through the skinning problems I was having with rigify. relearning all the things I did not really learn in the first place. I ended up scraping my old rig because I just simply broke it. I adjusted Ebil's base mesh a bit made a few improvements. Started creating shape keys for shoulder and hip deforms. It just did not seem to work for me the way it does for the gurus. Then about 2 days ago it all started working.

Here are some of the current results.

Working on lipsync shapekeys next. Then onto Timmy. 

Parenting objects in Blender 3D Child stops following parent

Parenting Snafoo

I learned today that if an object has physics on it, it will not work as the child of another object. At some point while modeling the body of my Van, I somehow added a rigid body property to it. When I would parent the body to an empty for rigging it would follow the parent once, then it would stop following. The parent child relationship showed up properly in the outliner, however the child would not follow the translations of the parent. This stumped me for about an hour. I was searching the web and finally found a short paragraph somewhere that mentioned the physics issue. Hope this helps someone else.

Once I removed the rigid body node, The parenting works fine.

Back in the saddle again

Out with the old

I took a break from Ebil mid year to work on a pro bono project :

graveyard

I started working on Ebil again a few months ago and have been reworking old assets.

I lost a good bit of work when my computer crashed. I recovered my project files from the cloud and other backups. In the process I decided to rework some of the things I never really felt 100% about. Mainly the characters. I've spent a little time retypoing Ebil's mesh and I plan to re-rig him. I'm not very good at the rigging process. I'm using rigify with a few custom tweaks I have watched a half dozen tuts on how to use the rig, but I can't seem to get it to just poof parent perfect to my mesh. Still getting weird tears an bends in the mesh. I'm not getting a full animatable range. For the Bus Stop sketch I think it is adequate. There is not a lot of complicated animation. I want to get the project done. I have to consider some things good enough. Scope creep is a thing.

I have been updating the traffic fleet. Hard surface modeling is much easier to me. I could make cars all day long.

Ebil Fitness Camp Day 008

And more walking

yet another walk cycle. 24 frames, 24 Frames per second. Stride, strike, pass, stride.

I do like the timing of this one better. Less popping and jerking. I think the other one was using fewer frames. This is still rough, but I need to understand these basic poses better before I start breaking it down more. Made more sense today.

Ebil Fitness Camp Day 007

Licensed to kill?

I have the fitness camp surrounded by vast array of columns. I have to keep Ebil contained.

Ebil Fitness Camp Day 006

Walk Revisited

I looked at a few walk cycle tuts and redid a walk from a clean rig. Again only 3 poses here: Stride, Pass, Stride. Not much to say about this. I did play a bit with tweaking the pass pose with interesting results, but I did not keep any of that.

 Push Ups

Ebil was not sweaty enough from his was, so I made him do some pushups to round out the day.

Ebil Fitness Camp Day 005

Walking

Quick and dirty walk cycle. I have looked at break downs of walk cycles for years. Done a lot of different tuts and exercises. I still can't seem to get it right. This is one of the basic animation skills, a walk cycle. One of the main goals I hope to get out of this whole fitness camp is a decent walk cycle. Again it takes time, and repetition. Starting from a blank rig (no keyframes) The cycle I have here is rough. about 30 mins of work. Just a few keyframes positions. Stride, strike, pass, stride. It is still very twitchy, has no soul. Need set up my camera and do a motion study.