Well I’ve started using Houdini.  What an awesome application.  Using some of its magical powers I have implemented an idea for displaying rig controls as the mesh of the character directly.  This way there’s no silhouette or rig controls to hide every time you want to see your animation.  At least that’s the theory.  Anyway here’s the video of the quick experiment on a simple cylinder.

And this time it’s a video of a still incomplete facial rig. It’s fairly simple using mainly shapes for the bulk of the work on the eyebrows, eyes and mouth shapes. The eyes also have some latticing, but nothing fancy. I still have to deal with lip and teeth penetration, rig a tongue and get some eyelid shapes in there as well. I have to turn the hair off during interaction because it is horrendously slow with it displaying… Shave & Haircut certainly wasn’t designed for anything realtime.

Here’s a video I’ve made of a bunch of most of the rig features my Spaceman character has. It’s actually a modification of an old, old rig that originated back about 5 years ago, just made a lot faster, but kept a lot of the features (and added some more).

At the start you can see me moving a plane around that is raycasting some points onto the body. This is a quick ICE tree I’ve set up to drive a weightmap that modulates certain snow and ice effects on the materials. Since some of the setting of this short is going to be in snow, then he has to show frost and snow accumulation on him. This was a quick way to do that since it casts shadows and saves me painting a new weightmap each shot.