megasaur wrote:

I enjoyed animating this rig a lot for the august 2011 competition!
There was one thing I'd really like to see, though, and that is that the stomach/chest squash and stretch as that area is pulled apart and squashed together. When I animated it there was no volume preservation going on at all.

Perhaps I just missed a control to make that happen?


Thanks!

And I enjoyed watching your entry! It was really very good, one of my favorites! (even if you wouldn't have used eleven )
I'll have a look if I can pipe a volume preservation into the body stretch, but I'm not sure if I can, actually. I'll do my best Anything else you noticed while animating? Please let me know!

CHeers!

Wolfi

Also thanks to you, katana, for your information!

megasaur wrote:

...By the way, I guess - if you've built the entire rig, wolfor - that I must be sounding like an ass suggesting a Set Driven Key-solution to you!...

I didn't, actually. The rig was built by Angelo (dance3d, the guy who started this thread) He just got too busy finishing it, so I started reverse-engeneering it and am now maintaining it. I actually thought something along the lines what you proposed, maybe not as driven keys, but I'll see what happens

megasaur wrote:

... I don't really dare to go in and poke around in another person's rig. Could be dangerous! ...

I did, it is! I already had some fun with that, and not only on this rig

Last edited by wolfor (09-09-2011 8:38 am)

katana wrote:

Max11 goes Trekkie!



The Eleven rig for 3DS Max users is finished. I am doing some prelim testing and will need to write some documentation before release.

Yay, Chris!
Great news! After all that struggle...
Can't wait for the release!
cheers!
Wolfi

Last edited by wolfor (09-26-2011 6:36 pm)

hey..  i checked out the rig, it seems really cool...   i don't know if anyone is working on it anymore, but i had a suggestion that could make an improvement.

maybe i havent looked at the rig in enough detail but seemed to me the knee and elbow pole vectors could function much better if they had a no-flip type setup like this tutorial..     i am aware you can make them follow the ankle, but it still flips

Direct Link

then if a twist attribute could be added to the arm and foot ik controls, (i think just plugging an attribute into the 'twist' on the ik handle) like on the animation mentor rigs, you could animate the arms and legs without any hassle from flipping and having to mess around with pole vectors.    some people seem to not mind animating with pole vectors though, so it would be of course optional. either use the twist attribute or the pole vector.   either way though the no-flip thing is the main thing otherwise it seem like a contant battle to keep your knee and elbow doing what you want.

great job though, its really appealing

edit: also another small thing.. it would be good if you could disable the volume change on the stretch of arms and legs....   i find that most times you want to stretch or scale the limbs its as a cheat, ie give the impression of a normal sized limb, but actually it's scaled or stretched, but becuase the volume changes its very obvious its been scaled or stretched, so the cheating is obvious.

Last edited by bozo (10-11-2011 5:31 pm)

hey wolfor

one thing is to make sure you copy settings he has in the aim contraint window, thats easily overlooked as he breezes through pretty fast. it wont work unless you have the specific settings.

there may be an issue with cycle errors which i assume is related to dependancy loops as you mentioned. i don't really understand many of these technical things myself but there may be an issue.

what i found was that if i aimed the hip locator to the leg ik control it was fine, but if i aimed it at the ankle joint, there was a cycle error, and the pole vector would not update properly between frames and when undoing and things so the leg twist would be temporarly pointing the wrong direction till you move something again.

but the problem was if it was aimed at the ik contol, that if you used foot/ball roll etc, the ik control stays still, and its no longer pointing at the ankle and you have the potential for flipping when translating with foot/toe roll on.

but then i sent it to the guy who made the autorig i used and he fixed it somehow so it worked ok whilst poiting to the ankle joint...i thought the problem might have been a quirk of my rig though, so could work ok on eleven.     if it does have a problem though and you are interested in fully implementing it let me know and ill try and find out the solution

there is this method though which is pretty effective...

Direct Link

but has a couple of disadvantages.. some people might not like having there pole vecotrs out to the side, and isnt completely no flip technically, and i don't thnk it would work on the arms very well.

Last edited by bozo (10-12-2011 3:30 pm)

cool, no problem...whatever you feel works best

Last edited by bozo (10-12-2011 10:09 pm)

The Chaplin stache is nothing more than a box geo. It can be added onto if you want it thicker or wider, but you'll have to do that yourself. For clothes, they have to modeled by the user. They can be painted directly on the UV map, combined with additional geo (lapels) or you can model a full suit, which would require ncloth with collision and or weighting, depending on how you want the final result to look.

Thanks for all your help, I have another question....What is the best way to attach the hat so it stays with the character as I animate him?

am I doing something wrong, each time i move the rig into the position and try to save as, I give it a name and it saves it, but then when I try to open it, it says: error reading file. so I tried saving my work to the original maya file, keeping the name elevenrig_rc1.ma and it acts like its saving fine so I did a bunch of work, saving constantly and after closing maya and trying to reopen the file, it opens and says: errors have occurred while reading this scene that may result in data loss. please check script editor for details."  And the character is back to his original position, and lost all the keys I set. 

Here's what the script editor says: file -f -new;
// untitled //
commandPort -securityWarning -name commandportDefault;
// Error: There are no more commands to redo. //
file -f -options "v=0"  -typ "mayaBinary" -o "/Users/AshleyBrandvold/Documents/maya/projects/11_Rig/Scenes/test_setup.mb";addRecentFile("/Users/AshleyBrandvold/Documents/maya/projects/11_Rig/Scenes/test_setup.mb", "mayaBinary");
// File read in 0 seconds.
// Error: Error reading file. //
// Error: Error reading file. //
file -f  -typ "mayaAscii" -o "/Users/AshleyBrandvold/Documents/maya/projects/11_Rig/Scenes/ElevenRig_RC1.ma";addRecentFile("/Users/AshleyBrandvold/Documents/maya/projects/11_Rig/Scenes/ElevenRig_RC1.ma", "mayaAscii");
// Warning: file: /Users/AshleyBrandvold/Documents/maya/projects/11_Rig/Scenes/ElevenRig_RC1.ma line 757220: Unrecognized node type 'mentalrayItemsList'; preserving node information during this session. //
// Warning: file: /Users/AshleyBrandvold/Documents/maya/projects/11_Rig/Scenes/ElevenRig_RC1.ma line 757221: Unrecognized node type 'mentalrayOptions'; preserving node information during this session. //
// Warning: file: /Users/AshleyBrandvold/Documents/maya/projects/11_Rig/Scenes/ElevenRig_RC1.ma line 757313: Unrecognized node type 'mentalrayGlobals'; preserving node information during this session. //
// Warning: file: /Users/AshleyBrandvold/Documents/maya/projects/11_Rig/Scenes/ElevenRig_RC1.ma line 757316: Unrecognized node type 'mentalrayFramebuffer'; preserving node information during this session. //
// File read in 5 seconds.
// Warning: Errors have occurred while reading this scene that may result in data loss.
Please check the Script Editor for details. //

What am I doing wrong??

Hey Ashley,
regarding you first post, you parent-constrain the hat to the head control, and if you want to animate it away at some point, you also parent constrain it to something else, like the hand, or better still, you use an inbetween object, like a locator and parent constrain it to that and then you can switch the contraints back and forth.
Actually on second thought, just take a look at this thread:
http://www.11secondclub.com/forum/viewt … p?id=14990
where Camaro did a great job explaining some advanced constrain stuff.

Your other question, like Camaro said, it seems that you don't have the mental ray plugin loaded, you do that by going to Window->setting/preferences->plugin manager and check both loaded and autoload next to Mayatomr.mll.
If maya crashes while you do that, there is some problem with your maya installation.
Now see if you get errors when saving the file.
The other thing I can recommend you to do is to save your files always as .ma and not .mb because being plaintext you an always edit them without having to open it in maya (can be quite useful if some bug prevents it from opening)
And thirdly, when animation, always use refereces of the character, don't import it, that way the file size stays small and you can exchange the rig if you have some updates on it.

Hope that helped, if not, let me know

Cheers!

Wolfi

Last edited by wolfor (10-19-2011 10:39 am)

Hey all,

I have a scene where I've referenced in the Eleven rig, but my latest file won't open (it gets stuck reading the rig file at 98%).  Might it have to do with the fact that I made all the geometry smooth (2 instead of 0) before I saved?  I hope I can open it!

Thanks,
Chris

EDIT:  I think that was the problem.  Many, many minutes later, it loaded. :-P

Last edited by Chris.Daley (10-24-2011 11:45 pm)

I did it with the ground and head controllers.  But I've noticed that, even if I save with Smooth back to 0, it still takes forever to load.  No idea why!