Introspection

In terms of where I saw myself being at this point, I thought that I would have an auto-rigger that would size and skin a skeletal system to a mesh completed at this point. That has been my major disappointment in my project so far. I really wanted to have it that the user would have to do minimal work to create these walk-cycles, but unfortunately it's really hard to find a lot of material on the concept. And my main source of material - Pinocchio - is hard to use in Maya, because it's not exactly open-source. I think that if there's a way for me to bring the Pinocchio skeletal system into Maya somehow, I could possibly still incorporate it into my project, else, it might be something to think about after the project is over.

One thing I should focus on is working on adding to the skeletal structure that one rigs with. That will add a lot more realism to my character movements if I can add more foot joints and ankle joints. Since I can't get sizing to work out, I should still work on the fact that I wanted more complex rigs skinning properly. I am looking through Advanced Skeleton's code to see how I can do that.

In terms of animations, I wanted to have most of the animations in with minimal changes needing to be made. At this point I've created weight and age completely (minus some needed improvements, and making them longer) and have done a lot for height, but I still need to work on my gender animations. Once those are in place, I can hardcode the numbers into the shelf, and be done with my four basic parameters. It won't take too much longer to finish those up, thankfully, so I should have that in place by the end of the week, with the changes Norm suggested too. I've been rigging up some characters, to test my animations out on, it'll be interesting to see the results. I wanted to have a wide variety of characters to test my code out on, so I'll need to keep rigging, since I only have three characters now to use. At least 5 or 6 would be ideal, I think.