Rig Demonstration

Soft Body.

I needed to make a quick video to check the rig was working and to see how the soft body Dynamics looked...

The Rig 05

The final Rig after someone pointed out a few ways I could improve it. 

The Rig 04

The creation of the Controls.
(I discovered later that I'd left out the elbows and knees by mistake and had to add them back in)

The Rig 03

With the muscles applied to the skin as deformers I made a quick video to demonstrate them in use.

The Rig 02

Next step was to add the capsules muscles in places that made sense. I wasn't trying to be super accurate with them. I just wanted them to be roughly anatomically correct in a way that they would assists with the deformation and make it more believable.

The Rig 01

Beginning the rig with the skeleton and painting the weights properly.

Final Model.

And the final low poly model and Sculpt.

(XSI, Mental Ray)

Hi Poly

Sculpted in ZBrush and rendered in XSI (Mental Ray).
Here is the Hi-poly sculpt for the character.

Cthulhu Concept

Using what I've been learning in Creative Research. I concepted my idea for the model.

Initial Idea for Model and Practice rig.

I practiced rigging up a set-up for multiple tentacles with Soft Body dynamics. As by this point I was certain I wanted to make a Cthulhu model to rig. Took a bit of time to figure out how I wanted to set it up but It worked in the end.

Soft Body Proof of Concept.

A screenshot of the soft body in action along with a demonstration video.

Soft Body.

Another feature Ive used before in XSI and wanted to see how Maya handled is Soft Body dynamics.
It didnt take too long to do at all just using a model I had built for Computer Arts Practice.

Muscles again

Had such a headache getting them to work properly. But I feel that I have the hang of it now, and Im able to get a muscle system working reasonably quickly now.

Muscles

Ive been wanting to work with a muscle system ever since I saw this video.

http://vimeo.com/43913057

And knowing that Maya came with an inbuilt Muscle system I couldnt wait to get to grips with it.

So I began a series of practices using a Digital Tutors tutorial to quickly learn the ins and outs of the system.

Rig Comparison

Taking my rig and comparing it to the XSI Man default rig. It leaves a lot to be desired. However it is just a practice piece and I feel that it is time to move on to learning some more of Maya's tools.

Mirrored Skinned, controls.

Controls are in place, the rig is skinned and functions adequately as a practice piece and getting used to rigging in maya.

More Rig

Chugging away on the rig.

Foot Driven

The foot driven system did not work. I could not get the Offset for the hips working properly. There was very likely some basic mistake I was making however I'm not going to dwell on making this fancy rig and just get something good working that wont make me bang my head off the screen too much.

Practice

And so as practice I began rigging the default XSI_Man model In maya. With a view to getting the foot driven system working within this software.

Rig Research

Softimage itself comes with a very good selection of pre built rigs. A lot of which incorporate some great tools. One of my favourites is the Synoptic view. I doubt I will have the time to build something similar but it is an idea I will be keeping in mind.
I also took note of some of the functionality that these rigs provided and how I would incorporate that within my own.

Back to Baics

I wanted to try and build a similar rig within Maya. I went back to the basic model I created last year as a proof of concept just to re-solidify in my head how the rig actually worked and how id go about creating it in Maya.

Foot Driven IK Workings

Bit of a closer look at how the rig is set up. Having this point that is always fixed halfway between the feet and having the hips and upper body move as it moves (with an offset applied to the hips)

Foot Driven IK Rig

My goal for this module is to build off what I did last year when making a very shoddy rig in order to have the ability to pose my model. The rig itself is a foot driven rig, meaning that the center of mass is always positioned above the halfway point between the feet. You can essentially walk him forward just by moving the feet.