Here it is, ready to be sent out and shown to the world.

Breakdown ||  Resume

I completely re-thought the arm rig today. I’ve added a better IK/FK blending and more stretching controls for FK mode. I’ve also added a control to “break” the arm in IK mode, giving you complete control over the elbow. This is the trick that took me a little while to solve but it was actually quite simple in the end. Of course, it retains it’s good twisting deformation and shaper controls. In the video is also demonstrated shrugging Vs normal style shoulder control. Again, there has been no weight painting, so the deformations are a bit lumpy in places. Overall this new arm is a lot cleaner and has more control.

Not included in this video is the volume preservation with squash and stretch. This is included in the rig now, but was absent at the time of the video.

This is a video of an arm rig that I’ve been meaning to make for a little while. It has all the typical cartoony controls on there that allow you to bend the arm into lots of shapes, it allows you obviously to work in IK and FK on everything, to have smooth (non-popping) stretching, good twisting deformation in all poses, and of course for all features to work well together without exploding. It also works well with the squash and stretch of the torso, where the mass moving to the top will actually move the arms a bit.

Again, I haven’t spent much (if any) time painting weights for the deformation, so what you’re looking at is mostly default. I had to do a bit of simple weight painting around the shoulders because that’s obviously one of those tricky areas that otherwise explodes.

Also shown in the video is a bit of the head/neck IK/FK stretchy control I have. It really isnt very interesting, but it does give you complete freedom of how you want to move the head either by position or rotation, either attached to the body or not.

The mesh is a t-shirt that Roman wears. I didn’t do any envelope painting at all on this, and it’s already 90% of the way there (obvious problems around the sleve areas). Also there’s no sqush and stretching on the very top and bottom, since they will need the hips/head to be present for the volumes to be continuous. With a few shapes I can get pretty nice looking creases in the cloth with relative ease. Anything to remove the need for cloth sims is great!

Here’s a few expressions from my Character, “Roman”.

I decided on a bit of a change for the website. This one should be more interesting! Hopefully.