Rig demos

I thought i'd add a couple rig demonstrations to show off the rigs capabilities a bit.

Turntable

The animations and turntable video is now completed, honestly I would have liked to put more time into the animations to make them look a lot better than they do now, but as animating was not an essential part of my proposal I don't feel too bad about leaving them as they are now.

Passes

With all of the rigging out of the way I can now just focus on the presentation of my project. 

I have already tidied up each project folder to have only the necessary  files and without any extra data slowing it down, so they are now ready to be handed in as a finished product. I'm currently working on a turntable video to showcase the two characters, and if i've got time i'll throw in some hastily made animations too.

The various passes that will be on show, textured, ambient occlusion and wireframe.

Podium

quickly threw together a podium for the characters to stand on in their turntable debut.

Facial Rigging

Facial rigging for the Referee is now complete, here you can see the various lattices, clusters and controllers used to animate his face. The brow controls have a lot more impact on this character as opposed to the Luchador because of his eyebrows.

Fleshy Eye Rig

I just implemented a 'Fleshy Eye' Expression to both my character rigs, this means that the eyelid joints are driven by the direction that the eye joint is looking, making the eyelids deform as the character looks around. It gives the characters a lot more realism in their animation.

Mirror Weights Tool

While skinning the referee I had a number of problems with the mirror skin weights tool no matter what options I tried to fix them. Weights were not being mirrored accurately and in many cases the previously painted weights were being overwritten causing a lot of lost work time. Eventually after a lot of hassle and painting weights for both sides individually the problem seemed to subside somewhat and now the mirror weight tool works for the most part...

Referee rigging!

Lots of updates of my rigging with the referee which I now still have to finish the facial rigging but his skeletal rig is officially complete! 

  Spine rigging complete, same as the Luchador.

Finished rigging his feet, eyes and shoudlers. I'm about to add hand controllers.

 Here I've added extra joints to control the referee's ears, the Luchador rig had no ears so this is new for me, but simple orient and point contraints worked fine.

Finished skeletal rig, onward to facial rigging!

Finished Wrestler Rig

The rig for the Luchador is now completed, I can move onto the Referee's rig now.

Facial Rigging

With limited time left I have opted against facial rigging using blend shapes and instead will just be using joint / lattice based deformers to create expression.

Here are the lattices attached to the upper jaw, along with their clusters which are used to deform the lattice.

I then created these controllers and parented them to their respective clusters to create a means to control the lattices while still being able to 0 out deformation with ease.

Eyelids

I've now skinned and added channels to control the eyelids for blinking and winking.

Finished Basic Rigging

I've finished adding the foot controls, complete with reverse foot rig for heel, toe and ball roll custom channels as well as twists. Both the arms and legs are controlled by IK handles with pole vectors on the knees and elbows. I considered adding an FK switch and joint chain to the arms but decided against it due to time constraints. (I still need to paint weights on the Luchador and rig the referee!)

More rigging

I've now added controllers to the Wrestlers eyes, shoulders, hands and elbows. With the hand controllers also containing custom channels to control each finger individually. I used Aim constraints to control the eyes and will later add custom channels to control his eyelids.

Spine rigging

I've spent the day rigging my characters spine. He now has a global controller that his root joint is parented to, allowing him to be scaled up and down universally as well as moved across the scene. His hips can now move independently of his upper body, and his spine, neck and head are all rigged with various orient contraints. Because there were more spine joints than spine controllers, I used Multiply / Divide nodes in the hypershade editor to cause each joint effected by a controller to be relative to the number of joints in that chain, be that 50% or 33% influence.

Referee Joints

The skeleton for the Referee how now also been finished alongside the Wrestlers. I will now focus on rigging the Wrestler before coming back and touching the Referee again.

Wrestler Skeleton

I have finished building the joint chain for the Luchador and using heat map smooth binding have attatched the skin to the skeleton.

Comb Over

I thought the ref deserved a nice comb over to go with his new eyebrows. He is now fully modelled and textured and ready to be rigged, as is his Wrestler counterpart.

Ref Skin Shader

Using the same techniques as with the Wrestler I created a subdermal scattering skin shader for the referee and applied his base texture over the top of it, adding stubble, arm and leg hair to his texture.

Shoes!

I modelled and texture slapped a nice pair of knock off converse for my refeee to wear around the ring.

Skin Shader

With the referee for the most part modelled I thought i'd take the time to create a subdermal skin shader to go with my characters base textures in an attempt to create a more realistic skin.

Ref attire.

After re-importing back to zBrush I textured the Referee's clothes.

Another face emerges

I modelled some eyebrows for the referee and gave him his eyes and tongue.

Referee Clothes

With the referee retopologised I was able to extract the clothes and then subdivide and sculpt details onto them before exporting to maya for clean up.

Referee Retopology

After spending the past month looking at the results of the auto-retopologised version of the wrestlers mesh I decided that it would probably be beneficial when it comes to rigging, weight painting and general deformation if I retopologised the referee myself, so I spent a week drawing each poly on the new mesh for the referee.

Mouth

After modelling the tongue I thought my characters would also be needing gums and teeth. I threw this together very quickly and could probably do with going back and tweaking the teeth to make them more realistic at a later date, but as I'm already way behind schedule this will have to do for now. The good news is I'll be able to use this mouth and the eyes I've already made for both the Wrestler and the Referee.

I have a face!

quick render of the wrestler with eyes and tongue attatched

Scaling

As most of the referee's body is going to be covered by baggy clothes not as much attention to detail needs to be paid to his body sculpt, however as the two characters are hopefully going to be interacting in the same scene one day I thought it best that I scale them appropriately by importing the wrestler mesh into zBrush and scaling the referee down accordingly.

Eyes!

Following a tutorial I found on youtube I thought now would be a good time to create eyes for my characters, I decided I would use brown eyes for my luchador and green eyes for the referee.
Using the mental ray shaders 'mia x passes' and a combination of ramp, and noise 2d texture shaders I created the layered textures to be used for the eye's irises. The pupil is a flat black surface shader as they are supposed to be holes. I then encased the eyes in a translucent sphere with a reflectivity value to give the eyes a hint of realism while still looking suitably stylised for my production.

I then quickly created a tongue that could also be used in both meshes and texured it again using a noise 2d texture on top of a pink layered texture to create the ridged effect a tongue has.

Boots!

using the same technique I used to create the other clothes, I extracted boots from the leggings mesh in zBrush then exported to maya, cleaned up the mesh, reimported to zbrush, unwrapped and textured before sending back into maya to add boot laces to the object.

Starting the Referee

 With the majority of the modelling and texturing for the Luchador done I thought it was about time I made a start on my 2nd character the Referee. I had been planning to do all three characters along side each other rather than finishing one then starting the other but I feel that completing one and starting the other allows me to focus more on the task at hand so I have left the referee til now.

Despite intending for the referee to be skinny unlike the wrestler, when i got into zBrush I had the idea to perhaps make him fat and short with a somewhat baby like appearance. However after spending a short time sculpting this I decided my original train of thought was much better and so scrapped my sculpt and started again.

This is the 2nd attempt at creating the Referee's block out, I used the exact same technique as with the Luchador, first zSpheres, then adaptive skin, then dynamesh.

Problems!

 After coming back to my zBrush file after polypainting the Luchador's clothes I came across this error with my mask, upon changing the geometry density this fracturing of the geo would occur for an unknown reason. I was eventually able to fix this problem by duplicating the mask at it's lowest subdivision level, subdividing the duplicated mask, to the same level of the original mask (without adjusting it's subdivision level as this is what cause the error) and then using the 'project mesh' feature of zBrush i was able to copy across the polypaint and sculpting information onto the newer unbroken mask.

Finishing Clothes

After exporting all the extracted clothes into maya and then deleting their inner faces to leave me with flat meshes I then imported them back into zBrush for unwrapping and polypainting.

Polypainting

With my character unwrapped I was able to slap on some polypainted textures, though nothing too fancy I added some definition and small details like nipples and stubble using this.

Creating Clothes

Using the masking and extraction tools within zBrush I was able to create geometry for the luchador's clothes from the existing mesh.

Unwrapping

 Using polygrouping in zBrush and the paint seams feature I am able to specify where i want to create seams for my UV unwrap of my characters base mesh.

Here are the final UV's for the Luchador.