Rig it Right – November update

Trucking along and only four chapters to go. Then a final tech check before I turn the manuscript in.  Chapter 14 is all about eyes, blinks and smiles. There weren’t too many surprises in this chapter until I tried to use the shape editor.

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Low and behold the shape editor does not like anything by direct vertex manipulation on its blendshapes. Well, my technique uses anything: deformers, lattices, etc. Those don’t work with the shape editor workflow.  Perhaps in the newer version of Maya (2018) we’ll see during the final tech check pass.

Chapter 15 is the completion of the bird rig. We create a main control that scales the rig and take a look at where to place the FK and IK controls so that they work properly.

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We cover how to connect scale constraints to non skinned geometry such as the eyes and clean up the outliner.

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The cover has been put into production and we should start to see that up for approvals in December.  All in all – coming along.

I was sweating this month’s deadlines. With the holiday and we have had such neat things going on at work – even after the quarter was over – in the evenings. Last night we hosted a private screening of “Wind River” at SCADshow (the Atlanta campus theater) followed by a Q&A with Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner, moderated by Chris Evans. To top it off, the evening was introduced by Robert Downey Jr.  You know, the Avengers. What a night. Go see this film. It is powerful.

Today we had Reese Witherspoon giving a talk. Who can write with all of this going on? Yet, I write and have met my internal deadline. Whew.

-t