Monday, May 9, 2011

New Rig Tests - Cartoon Guy

Just a little test with a newly released rig floating around...
See this thread (http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?217823-Cartoon-Guy-Rig) over at BlenderArtists for details.

Just a few comments about this rig in case the author stumbles across this post:
  • You need to set those Font objects for the control panel to not be renderable
  • It would be nice to have the objects assigned to groups already so that you could just link in the group to a shot file instead, proxify it, and start animating. This just means I'd have to fix that first myself before making further use of this.
  • It'd be nice if the eye target was locked to the head or at least the root by default, possibly with option to fade out this influence to allow focus to stay locked on a target if need be for a shot
  • There's no control for pupil dilation
  • Unless I've overlooked some controls, it's a bit difficult to control the spine bending. Perhaps the spine control is located too low for it to work nicely (compared to the ones in the Durian rigs)
  • The facial-rig seems to produce some nice effects, though I've noticed one or two artifacts with certain mouth shapes (narrow + open + frown IIRC) where the the sides of the face act strangely. 
    • Is there any way to get those middle-controllers for the eyebrows to go further down? In this shot, they're already way down as far as they'll let me go.
    • I'm not terribly fond of these slider-panels in 3D-view setups, though this one seems a bit more acceptable than the ones we used to see.
    • I can't wait to try doing a little lipsync test with this face rig to see how well it holds up.
  • The layers access panel UI could do with a bit more work, mainly to make those settings a bit more self-describing since you can do that now.
  • Fix the default scene setup in this file! The camera should point at the character already, not float out in space pointing downwards. 
    • The shot above features a hacked-together lighting setup and repositioned camera along with cloud-textured world that does not come with the default file.
Apart from these semi-minor niggles, this is quite a nice rig. It certainly has a lot of visual appeal, which is something that many Blender rigs of old didn't have.

EDIT: playing around with this more, I've found that the eyebrow controls really seem to lack a way to force a greater curvature. For example, in this shot here, it would be nice to squeeze the inner eyebrows to curve closer to closer to the eye, instead of just shooting straight-up like a French-bread-stick.

1 comment:

  1. Aligorith,

    Thank you for looking at my rig and creating a critique on it so quickly. I am making changes to it and I plan on releasing an updated version soon.

    I was wondering how you assigned the objects to groups. I know a little bit about groups but I want to make sure I get it right before posting it.

    Thanks,
    Michael Edewaard

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