MEL Beginnings

I changed my Rig tool once again, but this one is definitely the final rig framework. I found Jason Schleifer's rigger to be a little confusing, so I searched some more and found Advanced Skeleton, which is even better and simpler in my opinion. My only issue with a lot of the auto-rigging tools I've found for Maya is that, first you need to align the given rig to your model, and then it will skin it for you. Which is fine normally, but I was hoping to do something more like Pinocchio, where given a model it figures out everything for you. I'm thinking as I move along further, I will try to incorporate some of Pinocchio's algorithms into my plug-in so that the user will not have to set up the rig in any sort of way.

Here's a look at how Advanced Skeleton works. I like it a whole lot better than the other rigger I was using, and I like that it has multiple feet joints, and all in all, is a more complicated bipedal rig than one generally finds on the internet.

The video took forever to upload! Sorry for the delay. Here's a video of me playing around with my first rigged model, and then again, re-rigging to get better results. I still need to improve on my techniques, but the skinning is pretty good, minus a few kinks!

Anyway, so my primary goal this week was to gather more data (have about an hour's worth of different people on campus walking), and start scripting. I started to script a walk-cycle, and I have a little test video of me trying to move a rigged character's leg forward. A lot of the MEL scripting right now is me trying to remember which joints to select and then key them at the right place. I'm really going to have to keep everything straight as I start moving into animating the full body. I hope to have a fully scripted walk-cycle some time this coming week. Since the primary movements of the joints are translate and rotate, I don't need to worry too much about too many MEL commands. I hope that stays true for the future. But that will make it easier to "weigh" when incorporating my data of the different human types.

Here is the super-short test of me moving the rigged character's foot forward. Sorry it's so short, I haven't had time to render a better video with more movements.