Did a month-long apprenticeship with @riggingdojo to study and apply techniques for achieving realistic human deformation using joint-based systems.
— Muhammad B. Tahir (@muhammad_rigs) October 2, 2020
All the deformation here is joints (4 inf/vtx). The delts and traps are procedurally driven by the shldrs & clavs, rest is SDKs. pic.twitter.com/xyri6X2VUN
I've been setting up a character rigging pipeline for @project_stamina, currently refactoring code from rudimentary scripts I initially wrote to rig complete components of the 1st character. This is also when I (iterated like crazy to) set standards for the rigs. #rigtip #maya pic.twitter.com/K7dC4SUKcy
— Muhammad B. Tahir (@muhammad_rigs) October 8, 2019
Twitter thread continued:
I have a functional and practical coding env. for Maya set up, I have the rig structure figured out and I'm just adding more modules to the autorigger. I've been in close collaboration with the character modeler (@patatogram ) and animator (@LordaPol) to revise+improve standards.
The autorigger will meet most needs of the project and, the way I've set it up, I'll be able to hand off a rigged character to animation asap while I continue making manual additions to the rig. Animation will be non-destructively transferable to the latest version of the rig.
Autoriggers are a topic I did not find a lot of information about on the internet when I started out doing this. I'm more than happy to have conversations about this through DMs or this thread. I'll also make the code publicly available through GitHub when I'm done.
I wrote a module for engine-ready cartoony limbs for my Autorigger. Continue reading this thread for a breakdown of the setup. Reach out if you want to discuss further and please share how you set up cartoony/stretchy limbs! #rigtip #maya #rigging #autorigger @project_stamina pic.twitter.com/DNWTrfnlFB
— Muhammad B. Tahir (@muhammad_rigs) November 11, 2019
Twitter thread continued:
I have a functional and practical coding env. for Maya set up, I have the rig structure figured out and I'm just adding more modules to the autorigger. I've been in close collaboration with the character modeler (@patatogram ) and animator (@LordaPol) to revise+improve standards.
The autorigger will meet most needs of the project and, the way I've set it up, I'll be able to hand off a rigged character to animation asap while I continue making manual additions to the rig. Animation will be non-destructively transferable to the latest version of the rig.
Autoriggers are a topic I did not find a lot of information about on the internet when I started out doing this. I'm more than happy to have conversations about this through DMs or this thread. I'll also make the code publicly available through GitHub when I'm done.
I’ve been experimenting with rigging an engine-ready face. No blendshapes, only joints. I kept an eye out for processes that can be automated or made simpler & WeightPainting is defo one.
— Muhammad B. Tahir (@muhammad_rigs) September 8, 2019
I spent barely 20 minutes modifying Maya's auto-weights on this for these results.
1/x pic.twitter.com/4l2qQJZzqN
Twitter thread continued:
The technique I used to rig this is described here in this (@SonySantaMonica ) talk: Link to Youtube video
Also, I've been very inspired by the insane work (@Muream ) has been sharing: Link to Twitter thread
With my experiments, I've concluded you can skip the cage-mesh step.
2/x
Here’s what I do:
1. Place joints for the face mesh.
2. Bind joints to a duplicate of the mesh with max vtx influences set to 1.
3. Bind joints to actual mesh with max vtx influences set to whatever.
4. Copy weights from duplicate to actual mesh. Smooth weights.
3/x
The eyelids (for one) definitely need more manual painting. I think I now know how to execute the face rig and will keep sharing results and learnings. I experimented a lot with polycount, joint placement, even topology, to compare results. Will share more as I go.
4/4