These past few weeks have been hectic to say the least, and I’ve been facing some personal and technical setbacks with this project as a result: files got corrupted, rigging skills I didn’t anticipate I’d have to use were rusty, and my earlier smaller technical difficulties snowballed into a bigger issue that prevented me from moving along my planned pipeline.
My plan for these weeks was to have my LBS/blend skin arm done so that I could move onto dedicating a couple weeks to learning Maya Muscle. However, this didn’t happen; I ran into technical issues getting the rig and reskinning to work, and then ran into some personal problems that got in the way of me resolving those issues.
I did manage to recreate a rig for this project, but encountered some problems with my rig in the forearm. I wanted to use an IK setup to achieve a rig that supports a natural twist in the upper arm and forearm. This is specifically because an IK rig allows me to twist along the entire length of the arm segment at once, instead of forcing me to adjust each sub-segment of the arm separately as I would if I were using FK only. Therefore, I’d be able to evaluate the quality of the LBS/blend deformations based off the rig and deformation systems alone, and mitigate any user error that would come with having to manually twist the arm.
However, something went wrong with the forearm rotation, and the rig in its current state is not usable.
With just 2 and a half weeks left in the term, I think it’s time to abandon redoing my arm rig from scratch. I’d wanted to go over my work from previous years and re-rig and re-paint it to get more experience with rigging, and so that I could tailor the rig to this project. However, with the past few weeks setting me back so far in my timeline, I think I have to just slap some blend shapes on top of my existing, weighted rig for the sake of time. The singular drawback to this is that this old rig doesn’t have the adjustments I made to the mesh to make musculature more visible to better show movement. If I want to leave myself enough time to build the Maya Muscle arm and compare the two through animation, though, I have to push on and deal with the less than ideal setup.
Moving forward:
I’ll be using the next two weeks on working with Maya Muscle. This is my highest priority now, since I have an (old, less than ideal) working arm for LBS that I can add blend shapes to later. Maya Muscle is the most necessary next step I have to take in order to get a proper comparison between the different deformation techniques, so I’m pivoting entirely to following a few Maya Muscle tutorials I’ve found in order to build out an arm from the pectoral/clavicle down to the wrist.
Week 10 will be reserved for animating the two arms side by side using a short reference clip of arm movements that will highlight poses featuring bent elbows, arms held close to the body (closed armpit), and wrist and forearm rotation. Then, I’ll analyze and evaluate the results based off:
- quality of muscle deformations (behavior of the muscle groups, ex. flex of the bicep when the wrist turns)
- quality of deformations in close corners (squash/clipping of the flesh at the bend of the elbow/armpit
- ease of completion/implementation