Muscle Rigging - Week 3

We have been looking at adding muscle rigs to the meshes. It is not necessary to fully rig up the zombie rig with muscles, but I will be looking at adding a couple muscles to it. Especially to the stomach, so I can emphasise the stomach movements.
To practise, we were given a "Muscle Man" rig.

I took looked around online for some muscle diagrams.

This image is from http://anatomy.askthetrainer.com/ - a training and fitness website.

I chose this image for the simple fact it gives you both front and back diagrams. I also went and printed this out to keep on my wall next to the computer so I can see the muscle system with just the turn of my head! A nice tip for everyone.

The muscles are set up with a series of clicks from the MuscleStrand option, under CAT Objects.

Under the modify tab, there are options for editing the muscle. I have set the muscles to Bones and to allow Squash and Stretch. Squash and Stretch will allow the muscles to flex when they are linked to the CAT rig.

I have named the first muscle Pectoral01, as this will make it easy to keep track of what muscle is what should I need several muscles on the rig. It's a good habit to get in to. 

I placed the muscle over where I needed it to be, in this example, over the chest and leading to the arms/shoulders.

By relaxing the muscle with this setting, I can keep the rig inside the mesh and will allow an impressive flex. I then connected the muscle to the ribcage and the upper arm.

I keyframed some animation, the arm lowers and then raises right up, then back to the starting position. This screencap shows the muscle being stretched.

I also added a second muscle to work as the muscle between the shoulder and the neck, the Trapezoid. 

When the arm was raised too high, the mesh would crumple, like this. I couldn't correct it with weighting, so I lowered the arm in the animation. This sorted it out.

As I had done with the zombie mesh when skinning, I added the muscles to the bone list, then began to edit their weighting. I used the Paint Weighting tool for this as it is a high poly mesh.

This is a render of the muscle rig.

I will want to go back and alter some of the weighting and maybe even the location of the trap muscle slightly. I would also alter the animation slightly, making it more of a Lateral Raise. This would move the pectoral muscle slightly, and the trap much less (unless his form was off, in which case his trap would be being worked more than his lats. Bro, do you even lift?)

To do this, I would be using workout tip videos, like this one by Matty Fusaro who talks you through the yes and no's of Lateral Raises.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HJG-gvG2N5E#t=177

I wanted to add the Bicep into the rig and have him flex his muscles in the final render.

Sadly, it destroyed the mesh.

It puts me in the mind of the cartoons, where a weak character flexes and his muscle drops down.

The final render with the weighting corrected and bicep removed.

Zombie Rigging - Torso - Arms - Head

Continuing the rigging of the zombie, I moved onto the torso.

I selected the areas around each of the bones and blocked them out. 

The first piece I began cleaning up on the torso was the Belt. This area is a constant width, so I had to keep that in mind with it;s weighting.

The belt is part of the spine bone so it will stay at it's constant width. It only needed a small weight edit.

A closer shot of the belt.

I found a slight error from the welding. It didn't weld it at all. This was a constant thing I had to fix, ensuring that any loops had 30 vertices selected became second nature when working on the torso.

To fix this issue, I just matched the weighting with the rest of the loop.

Blending the torso together finishes off the torso.

The toughest part of this rigging was just the error from the Weld and getting used to the fix I had done.

From here, I moved to the Shoulders, then down the arms.

Weighting areas to the Clavicle then blending them to the shoulders is a little tricky to get right just because of the way the shoulder reacts when moving. Starting with a 10% weighting at the neck/collar is where I kicked off.

Blending down the shoulder takes a certain mindset to know you are getting it right. I think I've touched on this before, where as you are working on the areas, they will look NOTHING like how you are wanting it to look until you are finished and it just clicks into place. Once I got my head around that way of thinking, it became easier to do. This shot is a perfect example of it. The big difference in the weighted section and the parts left to edit can be off putting.

Blending the next loop drops the gap down, then moving further down the shoulder, it clicks into place perfectly! 

The basis of the shoulder is weighted. From here I finetune the areas so as to get a smooth transition for the movement.

The underarm area was tricky to nail down. I used my own movements to get this section working properly.

This is the reference footage.

I then moved to the arms.

As always, I block out the areas to start. It makes blending the areas that much easier.

To get the elbow crush correct, I had to trial and error my way through it and to make it blend convincingly. This was the toughest area of the arm, I found.

Blending the forearm includes part of the sleeve. This is mainly for extreme arm twists, it will drag the sleeve cuff, slightly.

The bottom part of the forearm, I blended the upper forearm and the wrist together. The underside of the wrist has a slightly stronger influence.

I moved onto the hands. This was a fairly short process.

The hand needed blocking out, removing the influence on the fingers. These will be sorted out later.

Also, the crushing on the wrist needs tweaked right away. 

Using the opposite poses to where I want to edit, I select the vertices and begin to blend into a smooth transition.

The top of the hands.

For some reason, the hand had a couple vertices that would not change. I had to find the bone that was connected to the vertices and select a weight of zero. I don't know why it wouldn't allow me to do it direct to the new bone selection.

I worked on the fingers next.

The fingers needed a lot of work to get right. From the start, the fingers would splay out. This portion infuriated me to no end.

The fingers needed a lot of blending to make them look right. I would start from the tips and work down to the hand. The thumb needed so much work, as the third portion of the thumb is part of the hand itself. Getting this right made the hand really come together.

Here is a render of how it came out.

I then used the Skinwrap tool to take the symmetrical mesh and place the weighting on the original mesh.

After unhiding the original mesh, I applied a Skin Wrap modifier to it. These were the settings I used.

Ensure the proxy mesh and the original mesh are in the same position. I tried like this after scrubbing through the animation to check it was all fine and it matched the animation like this and looked very strange.

The tutorial said you could remove the proxy mesh at this point, but when I did, the animation would not carry over to the original mesh. It was a simple case of backing up.

Next was the head.

I set the eyes and mouth to be part of the head via the parenting option.

It keeps them as part of the rig in this way. 

Setting the head up to follow the head is the same as registering the bones, like I had done with the rest of the body.

When scrubbing the timeline to make sure everything was connected properly, I came across this little error.

It was a simple case of adding an extra bone.

To the bone, I gave it a weighting value of 100%. This would keep the neckline in place.

I would then blend the neck to give a smooth movement.

I had to play with the weighting a little more to stop the neck from breaching the torso when it moved.

This is a render of how the head movement came out.

My blog would not let me upload my reference footage, so I put it on Youtube. Here is the link.
http://youtu.be/ZbbjnEUPlw8

Model Rigging - Continued

Using the Zombie model, I have continued to rig.

Knee weighting. I have to make a smooth transition between the back of the knee and the calf. I could kind of get away with some errors because of the way the knee bends, it covers a large portion of the mesh/leg. I got it as close to real as I could, however.

The next step in correcting the weighting was the thigh. Blending the two portions of legs helps to give a smooth transition. There was a portion of knee which hung low, as can be seen above.

To correct the knee, I blended a little more on a lower set of  vertices.

This fixed the knee problem. 

I altered the weighting on the bottom of the leg, so the foot wouldn't affect the cuff of the trousers so much. It gives a slight movement, which would happen in real life. Give it a shot, go on! Rotate your foot and watch your cuffs. (Don't bother if naked or wearing shorts)

To make the mesh symmetrical, I cloned the mesh. This one was named zombie_proxy, so I know which the make the edits to.

I used the Symmetry to make "fix" the mesh. It has removed the untucked shirt portion. This will be added at a later date.

I enabled Mirror Mode so I could copy the data across to the opposing limbs.

To rig the hips, I select the full area and give it a weight Value of 100%, so I know which areas I am working with.

Since the hips and thighs will affect each other I go back to the thigh and blend with the hips.

The side of the hips and the bum of the model began to get infuriating. I had to edit so much of  it to make it work properly. To remove the stretching I had to use a lot of low values. There was a margin of error which I could use, as when the thigh raises to 90 degrees, the skin folds on the top of the thigh slightly. This allows a slight margin of error which I can work with.

I mirror the mesh again, but there are some slight changes which need to be made as they have not mirrored exactly.

Altering the Mirror Threshold I can get the sides to match up properly. I have highlighted the area which needed to be changed.

In the end, I get a set of hips with equal weighting.

When weighting the mesh, I found it to be a strange process. When editing two areas at once, it can seem like swimming against the current, but then, all of a sudden, it clicks right into place. Once I managed to get my head around it, I found it a pretty simple process.

MotionBuilder - Manipulating Clips

Following a tutorial given to me by my lecturer, I have combined clips and joined them together using Autodesk Motionbuilder.
Within the tutorial I blended clips together, like how I did in a previous tutorial. I also matched another clip to the model's right foot and it lines the clips up, making the second clip (the animation along the green line) follow on perfectly.

For the final piece, these steps will be used with the Motion Capture data to join them into one cohesive clip.

The clips within the timeline are two different colours showing the two clips used. There is a white X in an area of the Red clips which shows the blending of the first animation. They needed blending as the path was skewed and the animation at that point "jumps". Between the red and yellow clips, I match the animation to the right foot. This allows the animation to flow straight to it.