ORC DISMEMBERMENT! Week 3
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HI! This week I’ve been making some adjustments to the orcs body rig and finished off the face rig. Amputated legs and arms has also been created and rigged. I’ve dedicated allot of time on developing a good rig that without too many bones will provide the orc with some nice face expression capabilities. Solving how the amputation system should work has been a task that I’ve tackled this week and some body rig and mesh changes had to be made because of this. Our programmer Martin was unsure of how it was going to be made but he had noticed that selection of elements in a mesh was hard to execute. It was also problematic to split up the orc in areas were skinning ranged between bones. As almost all areas of an organic character should range between bones for a realistic animation this was a big problem. To solve this I targeted areas on arms and legs that should be animated as stiff, for example the center of the biceps. At these points I then cut up the mesh in two and the rig in three (the upper arm bone into three segments). This way I could skin the upper part of the mesh organically to the upper bone and the lower to the lower while keeping the vertices around the cut all stiff between meshes. By rigging the arm in three sections we gained the possibility to delete the middle bone to separate the meshes and launch the arm/leg as a projectile.
With a transparent mesh, we can see how two endings were made for the mesh just above the middle bone of the three bone segments. Polishing the face rig has been a long journey with allot of replacing of rigs and reskinning. Skinning takes allot of time and as hierarchy changes in 3dsmax is very unforgiving it had to be reworked many times as I found problems with rig and mesh that needed to be fixed. But half way through the process I gained a new tool to help and make reskinning faster. My mentor Camilla von Paykull showed me a way to copy skin data from a skinned mesh and then reapply it after made changes. This tool is great for saving data but also mirroring data if the standard vertex mirroring process don’t work (it never does).
This is the result of the face rig and skinning. As you can see, no mouth or tongue is to be found inside he’s mouth. I was happy with the rest of the face rig and had no time for mouth making at this time, so I decided to make the mouth as a separate mesh later on.
I made copies of the arms and legs that were to be chopped of and rigged them to make ragdoll animations available. This is a test version that the programmers needed to test the dismemberment system. Next week there will be more amputation work and texturing! Cheers! Spara  |
For last I want to share with you some dead orc limbs.