Posts Tagged ‘animation’

For a while now we have been using a custom script to export and import skin weights but a recent project made it necessary to re-work the code because it was just too slow for more complex meshes. Of course the task of transferring skin weights is nothing new and there are a bunch of [...]

While working on the Maya plugins iDisplace and iCollide I came across the idea for additional deformers. The maya bonus tools 2013 comes with the slide components tool, which allows to slide components over a surface during the modeling process while maintaining the shape (thanks to Steven Roselle for his awesome work). So the idea [...]

For quite some time I have been looking for a simple collision effect that could be used as a deformer. Unfortunately Maya doesn’t provide such a deformer without having to use soft bodies, nCloth nodes or muscle objects. The problem is that all these solutions are somewhat simulation based and time dependent and are maybe [...]

NEW VERSION! Just recently I was again in the need for a displacement deformer, but since Maya lacks such a basic deformer in it’s toolset I planned to use the great DisplaceD deformer, available on creativeCrash. Unfortunately the plugin doesn’t support Maya 2013, even though we are already halfway to Maya 2014. Since I needed [...]

This rigging series for maya is the summary of my rigging lectures at the school I am teaching. I found that complicated workflows such as rigging can be never slow enough when doing it in the classroom. Especially the basics of rigging can be overwhelming for inexperienced users and so I thought I’d put together [...]

For a recent production it was necessary to create a running horse and even with having done quite some character animations this was the first time we were dealing with four legs. That itself was not the problem but of course a rig was needed. And so I thought that if I already spend some [...]

I put together a video showing the complete animation progress from shooting some reference video to final animation. Here is the breakdown of the video: 1. reference video: This was a lot of fun, we shot most of it in our living room pushing around chairs;-) 2. storyboard / thumbnails: I combined these two steps [...]

This year we decided to create a special holidays animation. Since we already had the santa character ready, it seemed to be a doable task, although it was already the 1oth of december. Our goal was to be finished on the 20th, and we almost made it;-) Here is the idea: Imagine it’s two days [...]

In Maya gibt es keine direkt vorgesehene Funktion Blendshapes zu spiegeln. Damit es jedoch nicht notwendig ist auf umständliche Weise unsymmetrische Blendshapes doppelt modellieren zu müssen, lässt sich durch eine einfache Kombination von Blendshape- und Wrap Deformer schnell ein alternativer Workflow erarbeiten. Das Video zeigt die notwendigen Schritte dazu.

I just finished updating the character rigger tool. I just recently had an arm twist problem with a new character that didn’t occur before and also shouldn’t have occured. But there was no logical reason behind why it wasn’t working and so I decided to redesign the twist setup for the arms and legs. The [...]