2015.10.05-11 ::: RUB YOUR FLIPPERS EXCITEDLY.
This week I looked at the replacement animation thing from an alternative viewpoint to last week – that would be the viewpoint where I actually build something and try it out instead of guessing what I need it to do. I made a weird little googly-eyed guy, created a few mouths for him and made a little animation without any extra tools to help the process along. The animation is visible above. I think he’s saying “what?!”
Each replacement mouth rig contains at least a root position bone and a jaw bone. These bones are both constrained (slaved) to position and jaw counterparts on a master rig. The rigs also contain other bones which control their specific features – one has a pursed lip size control and one had a pout control. (While it’s possible to have geometry that can cover both pursing and pouting and more, this is a proof of concept.)
The first cool discovery came when I realised I could have the same action on all the different bones. This meant that the master bones and the custom bones on the replacement rigs can store their keyframes in the one place. Noice!
Alas, the keyframing that controls object visibility doesn’t live in the actions. It lives.. uh.. somewhere else. Fortunately, you can slave the visibility to a “visibility” control bone and that links just fine. Hooray!
A UI to make sure only one rig is active/visible at a time would help too.
The story is in active development again. I’ve got the outline written but the intro doesn’t give people a reason to keep watching yet aside from politeness and the fact that getting up from a chair is impossibly hard. Writing-wise I’ve set myself the relatively pathetic but easily achievable goal of a gag per night. It doesn’t have to be a good gag but it does have to exist. And writing funny things makes me happy.
Meanwhile, my desktop computer is doing things which make me suspect it wants me to spend money on it. A shiny new SSD however will have to wait until after I get back from Amsterdam in November. As much as I’d love to lose a weekend digging around in computer guts and bleeding, this weekend and next weekend are right out.
That’s all for this week. One more update from Perth and then it’s off to Amsterdam for Blender Conference 2015! Yay!
