Working on an update.
Copied from my site's blog: http://nixes.ru/?p=565
A few weeks ago I was trying out some concepts in Unity, to practice C# and learn some new things. I think it’s time to show some of it here.
Everything in this prototype was done by me, including awesome capsule models for enemies and animations for player character.
Collision-based damage, imploding\exploding grenades, turret spawning, shooting, gravity gun and in later tests even multiplayer support.
Auto IK FK Switcher works with any rig using a regular 3-chain IK-FK setup. It works with meta-connections (fancy name for connecting nodes using ‘message’ connections and finding them later through these connections), which allows it to be context-sensitive. The UI has just a few buttons, and it knows which IK-FK body part you selected, and will perform a switch for selected body-part. You can also freely rename controls and objects, it will still work.
It also has an automatic mode, which will switch IK to FK if you select FK and vice-versa.
Control Mesh Creator replaces control curves with mesh-based controls. They follow the original mesh, and are invisible to the animator, who can simply click on the part of the mesh to select a control. Similar to Pixar’s Presto software approach.
Phew, CSS3 is not nearly as hard as I thought some time ago. Updated this site’s design a bit, added some neat hover features, and made the “TOOLS” page where you can take a look at a few of my main tools I made and am using in my work. Some of them are available for purchase, some will be later, some may be free, so keep an eye on that page
And here come Pixar Presto’s style controls! A tool which allows me to quickly replace NURBS curves with controls following mesh. Very intuitive for animators. Thanks to Jason Schleifer for showing how this is done in Maya.
Well, it mostly works, and already created a script to replace controls with selectable mesh controls, details in the video.
Will create mini-ui for it, probably, and move onto creation of automatic ik-fk switching stuff… Or fix the rig itself. Or, maybe, put it away for a while, and rig something with advanced skeleton and animate it… Hm, not sure which will be next yet. We’ll see.
Hooraaay, Basic stretchy IK-FK is done. Can now quickly rig arms and legs, without feet yet. Scales correctly with the rig, thanks to Zeth Willie’s tutorial. Basically it will correctly scale under any circumstances, even if the character is parented to something else and that other object is scaled. Will try to make everything else scaling the same way.
In the video the character breaks when i’m scaling it just because nothing but legs and arms is rigged. But arms and legs scale correctly. Once I rig spine and head it will work just fine.
Currently it automatically finds 2nd and 3rd joints… But as I think of it now, it was not a good idea. If there are, say, twist joints in that hierarchy, the script wont work. But it’s no biggie, will fix this some other time.
Yeah, also forgot to add, I will, of course, add a nice pretty PySide UI to this!