Hey internet,
Work has kept me busy lately with new internal projects, I haven't had the chance to write up my PyQT tutorials I posted about few months ago, I'm sorry. For now, I'll put those on hold and just talk about the car rig you might've read about a while ago. It was never just going to be a car, I wanted to build on from that and write a transformer rig that I can be proud of. It's not really meant to look like any particular style of transformer (cartoon vs movies) so it's more aimed at being a technical challenge for me to build.
Most of my time has been spent cleaning up rubbish topology on the car, ha. I gotta learn to just say "it's done, leave it!" and move on, otherwise I could spend weeks on fixing the front bumper and end up getting frustrated and leaving the project all together from lack of progress. So far, I haven't got bored of it yet, so that's a relief.
I did some designs of what I wanted the robot to look like too, I kinda just blocked out a biped design and kept adding primitives to it, trying to get a strong silhouette, but keeping in mind that is has to function correctly so as not to have to cheat my way through the rig when I get to that stage. Ultimately, this is a rigging project, not a modeling one.
The car has had some touch ups done to it too, the shell is essentially done, need to build the engine and inside of it next. I'll be working on a basic rig soon as well to test out my rigging pipeline, which I started writing too!
My pipeline has most of it's foundations written, but is missing the controls and rig section of the code. At the moment, I'm only able to start a project and work within that, dedicated data folders and module structure is setup, skeleton generation, export/import position, aim data and publish the current build I'm working on. The skeleton is made with a guide system, which is just a different way to visualise how a skeleton is put together in Maya. From this collection of nodes, you can quickly generate and test the skeleton.
Here, have a look at some images! Here's the car at the moment:
Here's the the mech (with a quick IK rig) standing next to the car. He's got lots of model work to go, so I'll skip the closeups.
Finally, the guide system. It doesn't look like much, but for me it's gonna be super easy to write my own skeletons for each character -- the car and mech in this case -- and any future character rigs I may want to try build in the future.
Righto, that's all for now. Dunno when the next post'll be, probably around Christmas when I go home for the holidays! I'll have lots of spare time to get more of this project done.