So much coding!

This week was a lot of coding. Firstly on the rigging side of things. Right now I'm trying to combine Pinocchio's auto-fitting tool together with Advanced Skeleton's rigging tools. So this means taking the algorithms Pinocchio uses, and creating a MEL version of those algorithms and combining it within Advanced Skeleton. I was hoping to have it fully functional by today, but this is turning out harder than I thought. I hope to have it sorted out soon, because I feel like that is the hardest problem in my project.

Basically, I need to make a Maya version of Pinocchio's "fitting" technique, which is a really interesting concept. They basically pack spheres within the mesh, and then find the centers of these spheres for the skeleton to go to. I'm trying to recreate this algorithm in Maya, that will fit into Advanced Skeleton. This will allow the rig to have minimal distortion of the model according to their paper (and video). Then from there I will need to refine the skeleton further to make a well structured skeleton. My biggest issue with this has been figuring out the rotations of the joints, because Advanced Skeleton prefers rotations over translations a lot of times when fitting the skeleton in.

This is how it's supposed to look (in the beginning, at least, before refining the skeleton).

Besides rigging stuff, I've been looking at coding my different walk-cycles. My current plan is to hardcode the "extremes" of my different body types, and then blend these together based on the users inputs using different types of splines (probably b-splines). This seems like a natural and effective method of solving this problem, but I'm always open to more ideas. I've been coding my walk-cycles, but since I started off with generality, they didn't look so realistic. Thus that is now my main focus for the rest of the project - pooling my data and what I've been learning about how walking works to create the realism.

This week has been great for that, since in my Computer Animation class (CIS 462/562), we've started to deal with key framing walk-cycles (albeit in Motion Builder), and it's actually given me some really great tips on how to create a walk-cycle. My professor spent an entire class on the different components of a walk-cycle, so I'm trying to make sure that these components make it into my work. I realized through my preliminary work, that I wasn't keying everything I needed for realism, and true, I was rushing the work, but I think that going into Beta, I really want to focus on getting the realism down. When I've been reading about walk-cycles they mention the different motions, but Professor Lane put those motions into a more animation and computer perspective, which is definitely more helpful. So far, it's been slow progress - I don't have enough frames for a nice movie yet, but I think with practice, I'll also get better at the coding in MEL in general (there's only so many times you can type setKeyframe wrong and move your model in the wrong direction). I'm thinking that I might just key frame with the Maya tools rather than script, and then copy the code from the general editor, but this means I have to be aware of my steps all of the time, which can get confusing in the Maya shell.

Moving forward, continue to hardcode the walk-cycles. Get the auto-fitting for rig into place. And then putting these together!

p.s. I also realized that I have comments on my previous posts that I didn't notice until two days ago, so I'm sorry (Joe) for not replying. My comments didn't get emailed to me like normal.