Facial rigging class at CGSociety

I just signed up for Judd Simantov's character facial rigging workshop on CGSociety! I've been super excited for this class ever since I saw his demo reel. The class starts next month, and I'm looking forward to learning all sorts of fun things that I can use for my upcoming rigs for a short film I'm working on.

Check it out!

Rigging Reel

Kyle Mistlin-Rude Rigging Demo 2012 from kyleMR on Vimeo.


These are a few of the things I've been working on in the past couple of weeks. I'm currently also developing a modular auto-rigging setup, and there's another rig or two coming down the pipeline, so expect to see some more updates soon!

A few notes on the utilities/scripts I wrote:
SpareParts: Rig Utilities:
Fk/Ik matching is handled using metaNodes and a total of 3 functions, and the setup could conceivably be reworked into an even more generic framework. As it is right now, one function handles getting the selection and connecting to the metaNode, which in turn connects to rig components involved in the fk/ik switching process. The other two functions take care of fk to ik switching and vice versa. Any hinge jointed limb with a similar blending setup would work with these functions, allowing for a lot of functionality with very limited script. There's also an option to set keys to 'bake' the blend state and controller positions.

Space switching is handled using a similar node system, and the same set keys option is available for baking the parent space state.

Baking animation from the control rig to the bind rig, as well as rig export will also be handled by this script, but at the time of this reel, it was not implemented in the UI. (I had yet to get my hands on the final character model and do some engine tests, and I didn't want to distribute an untested script to the animators.)

The UI updates based on the current selection, so that only the options that apply to the selected control are available to the user. For instance, any selecting any control on one of the arms will allow the user to switch fk/ik state, but if any other control is selected, the button will be disabled. The same goes for the space switching and export panels.

mr Motion Trails:
This is a handy tool for animators tracking arcs. It uses Maya's built in motionTrails, but in a hierarchy independent of the animated control. This way, the point from which the trail is generated can be moved. In the example on the reel, I created a trail on the head control, which by default tracks an arc from the pivot point of the head joint. I then re-position the trail to draw from the tip of the character's nose, so the trail picks up head rotation and gives me a nice arc. In addition, the user can choose to add spacing markers to the trail, in order to better see slow-ins and slow-outs. The interface also gives the user an easy way of editing trail parameters, as well as removing the trails from the scene. The trails are not selectable in the viewport, so they don't interfere with animation control selection.

The script was written using pyMel, which seems to lack support for certain motionTrail nodes, causing errors whenever they are cast into PyNodes and variables. Finding a workaround to this was a fun challenge, since I needed to be able to access those nodes in order to edit their settings on the fly via the tool. I'm planning a future update for the script which will move away from Maya's motion trails and instead utilize a system of my own. I'll also include support for user selected colors and more display options.