Things are progressing. I hit a wall with it but somehow managed to get through it. The main things I need to get working is getting the eyelids to work and adding a main root control so everything can be moved at once and resized without breaking. i’m not sure how you would go about the eyelids so i’ll have to study the character in Antcgi’s tutorial series. Because yes, i bought the series so i have the models I can look at and I also have the scripts that he uses to make things faster.
I must have spent around a day and a half though trying to get one of the scripts to work properly. I effectively had to work out why it wasn’t working the way it should. Through trial and error I worked out it had a problem with the way joints were named so I had to keep changing the name and changing it back again for it to work. I still need to work out how to use it properly though because it doesn’t work perfectly but it will do for now.
I also don’t really have time to add attributes to the reverse foot so I won’t be this time. Maybe another time or on another model. A reverse foot is still something I could build again and again to understand things more. I feel like I understand how to make the IK/FK arm because I had to keep building it over and over to fix small errors that kept cropping up.
I’ve tried some skinning already which isn’t actually that stressful. At least not with a new tool I downloaded called ng skintools. Which is so much better than Maya’s default skinning tool which loves to keep crashing every 5 mins if you decide to use the Undo button.
Another strange thing that happened somehow was the model geometry itself had a bevel on all the items. i’ve no idea how it happened, whether I knocked a certain key or setting which added a bevel to everything. I was wondering why it looked a bit weird and the polycount seemed unreasonably high. Either way, I managed to remove it by just using the MEL script “delete” in front of the name of the bevel.
I more confident about getting it done now than I was a few weeks ago at least. I always hate to leave what I’m working on at a bit of a dead end because it means I’ll be pretty reluctant to open it back up again but i think I’ve left it at a pretty good place at the moment.
nialism.com 