Industry Exercise: Workshop

Steps by steps in Rigging for beginner.

1. Get a clean model with good topology.

2. Before starting to rig, remember to clean the history of the model. Go to Delete History by Type and delete history.

3. Next you will want to create layer of selection to make your life easier. For the polygon.

4. IK - Inverse kinematic : IK node control the chain of rotation

FK - Forward kinematics : Manually rotate down a hierachy

5. Useful tips :

Better to start the joint oriented to the right place. To achieve this, duplicate the model and start to cut out the joint so you can see where the joint should go to.
Naming the joint

Ideally if the joint local rotate in the same direction. To change this, Select the joint, under animation tab > Skeleton > Orient Joint option

6. Creating IK Handle Tool

Single Chain Solver
Rotate Plane Solver

7. Creating Nurbs curves controller for easier selection during animation.

Useful tips : Display joint size, either go into each joint or have all of the joint in the same display size.

Freeze Transformation after created 3 of the feet controller before setting the Pivot point and parented it to the correct parent.

8. Constrains

Point constrain - to adjust position only
Orient constrain - to adjust rotation only
Parent constrain - for both position and rotation

9. Create a curve to act as pole constrain. Pole constrain help the knee pointing to the direction it supposed to be.

create the curve
snap onto the knee
move the curve far from the knee
freeze transformation
delete history
pole vector constraint
check if it is working correctly

10. For the Arm

create 3D space marker so that you know where to put the joint.
in maya 2014 version. select the vertex > create deformer

11. Spine Joint

Rigging Workshop 1 : Introduction

Rigging Workshop 2 : Introduction

Basics in rigging for problem solving

1. Customising Attributes

The objective of customising the attributes is to block the animator to destroy the rig(note from Sanjay)

To customize the attributes, one can hide or show the attributes
Go to modify > add attributes / in the channel box > edit > add attributes
You can create limit for the attributes as well
Lock and hide the attributes / just hide.( this step is easy) but if would like to bring it back again you have to go to Edit > Channel Control and bring them back

2. SDK : Set Driven Keys

Set Driven Keys help to control the driven by the driver
Animation Tab > Animate > Set Driven Key > Set

3. Blend Shape

To make one mesh to look like another mesh
You can have multiple blend shape but it is the BEST to keep them under the same group (note from Josh)
The reason why we need Blend Shape
- correcting the blend shape
- facial expression
- breathing
Show the steps during the tutorial.
Making UI interface : combining blend shape and SDK

4: Skinning

A process to bind the joint to the mesh
have all the joint of 1 side of the body ready
mirror the joint before having IK controls
renaming the joint

Make sure all the joint is ready before skinning.
- Select the joint and Shift Select the Mesh > Skin > Bind Skin > Smooth skin (controller affecting the mesh)
Paint Skin Weight

Useful tips
* Work on one side
* Don't forget to use the animation in deformation test (recap on this point, what does this mean)
* Adding weight to the joint = takes the influences away from the other joint
Mirror the skinning
* Select the mesh
* Skin
* Edit Smooth Skin
* Mirror Skin Weight
*** Default pose have to be symmetrical character

Substance Painter : Introduction

Topology : Introduction

Retopology : Z Brush & Topogun

Substance Painter is a 3D Painting software for texturing, rendering and sharing the work across supported engine.

Starting up a new file.

Open GL Load the Bionic Arm Low.obj
Add the normal map.
Play with the painting brush and setting
Changing the material
Creating layer in Substance Painter.( It works almost like Photoshop where the masking fill is the same)
Changing the environment.

Shortcut Key in Substance Painter

Alt + right click + Drag / mouse scroll = Zoom
Alt + click drag = move around
Shift + Right click = Light
F1 = Both viewer
F2 = Textured
F3 = Material
C = For checking the map
M = going back to normal

Setting up the brush properties.

change the space/size
activate all the material tab
height
colour
brush size
material

You can also change the setting in the layer for opacity, and adding blend mode as well

Challenge:

Create a ring

Add staple

In this lesson, we learn to retopology some downloaded model.

This lesson is useful when you get mesh from modeller and you have to make sure the mesh is good to go and without any mess.

We learn to fix the topology and find out how to look for problems.

Once you get a model, check history. If there are a lot of history, delete them. Make sure to work from clean mesh.

Under Display tab go to > Head Up Display > enable Poly count.

With this feature turn on you can identify the number of vertex and tris in each face ypu selected. (F11 for shortcut face selection)

Simple tricks:

Go to smooth polygon, look for weird area, check using polycount.
Seperate faces view to identify the problems

To fix the problems there are different approaches you can use:

delete the extra vertex
merge the vertex
delete the edges
add edges using Interactive Spilt Tool
Always have a quad than a tri. Tri is not a bad thing, sometimes it is useful in the mesh.

Challenge : Car

What wrong with the car? How to fix it

A lot of unnecessarily edges at the bottom of the car - delete edges
All of the faces is seperated - combine the component
3 Tris in a Quad looking face - extra vertex found. delete the vertex / merged the vertex
Flipped Normals - Always remember to check the normal. It might look fine, but show normals will let you identify if it is flipped.
History - Always delete history!

Retopology of Demon

Demon was created in Z Brush. It includes a lot of details and the file contain 2.5 million of polygon.

Imagine you want to retopology the model and then bring it into maya for creating UV map for texturing, how are you going to do this?

With a high polycount model created in Z Brush. You can reduce the polygon for a better work in Maya. High polygons will either crash your Maya or slow down even just the process of selecting.

How to reduce the polygon count in Z Brush?

Merged the demon given that there are 3 different subtool.
Go to Z plugin > Decimation Master > Preprocess Current > Change the Value of K poly > Decimate current
Wait the decimate to be process.
Now from a 2.5 milllion poly count it drop to 300k poly count in my case. This is more friendly to use and navigate within Maya.

Retopology in Topogun

Topogun shortcut

Right Click to change between draw and move
X for symmetrical
Ctrl + Draw Click - starting a new point
Bridge to create face
Tool option : enable Make faces, so you can draw and create face at the same time.
Tube : Slice the arm in the same direction until end. Right click to create the loop

Now create the facial topology!

Use reference for facial topology.

Finish the whole Demon. (get the low poly Demon from Josh)

Bring it into Maya.

Low Poly Demon and Decimate Demon.

Bake the texture of Decimate to Low Poly using Transfer Map.

Bake!

Finally, I should look back into all the workshop and practice them once again. I have the habbit of taking down the notes and not remember to screen shot some of the important highlight.