With the walk cycle finished from yesterday, we needed a new exercise. We met back in the student center at 9am which, due to its large open space, suggested we would be be partaking in some sort of physical activity. We spent the morning acting as elderly people and children. The idea was to get motion reference for a piece of animation which would last us the rest of the week. We had to animate a character sitting down into a chair, either a hyper active child, or a fragile older gentleman/woman. This proved to be difficult as most of our joints are fully functional, which made it hard to act elderly. Acting as a child was even more challenging as our limb proportions as an adult differ greatly from those of a child. After sitting down the character is supposed to be disturbed and be forced to get back up again.
When we had finished gathering motion reference via our sketchpads and cameras, we headed to the labs to attempt to animate this sequence.
Because the character had to use their upper body to interact with the chair in some way, a new rig was needed. Campbell loaded up Maya and demoed the new rig that he'd put together which had fancy new IK controls on the arms. This would make it easy to have the hands stay in place when gripping the arms of the chair (something that would have made my life a lot simpler when animating Mr. Wood lowering himself into a wheelchair in the first year).
We referenced the rig and started to play about with these new controls until someone pointed out that when lowering the hips into a seated position, the user has no control over the position of the knees. Campbell heard this and quickly added pole vector controls to the rig right then and there. Because we had referenced in the rig like he showed us, all we had to do was update the reference and the new controls were there!
Obviously we needed a chair for our rig to sit down on, so we all set about modelling a rudimentary chair in the Maya scene. Campbell then offered to model a chair which he would then rig. We then watched as he created a chair and a set of blend shapes for the cushions and arms. It was only at this point that I realised how closely the animation and rigging disciplines are linked, and how useful it would be to have both skills for either profession. I imagine that being able to fix your own rig would be helpful from an animators point of view would be useful; just as animation skills would help a rigger create a more complete rig.
I chose to animate a child climbing onto the chair, where he would perch on his knees for a second before launching himself back off and running away. The immediate problem that I had was that with the new IK controls on the arms meant that while running towards the chair, the arms were left behind. I later found out that you can disable the IK using the 'IK Blend' control in the attribute editor. This meant that I could switch between IK and FK arms whenever I needed to.
The days experience for me was largely technical, in that I re-visited blend shapes and other types of rigging. I only really got chance to start the animation today, and will carry on tomorrow.
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