Week 14: Platypus Animation & Duck Rigging

Since I have completed the rigging for the platypus in earlier weeks, I have moved on to platypus animation. Over here I did the platypus walk animation within a time frame of 100 and ensure that when it is being looped, the walk animation will look normal.

Challenge

For animation to begin, I realised as I was doing that I need to set keyframes for all the controller for the animation to be issue free. However, having to select 22 controllers manually every time I need to set a keyframe for animation is tedious.

Intended Selection:

Solution

I went on to youtube to search for a solution and I found this video which was extremely helpful.

Thus, following this video, I attempted to make my own custom shortcut to select all of my controllers in one click. I realised one main difference in my script editor from that in the video is that I have several lines of code for my script editor while the video example only have one.

I managed to figure out that the important line that I need to middle mouse drag into the MEL script has the keyword "select".

Afterwards, I middle mouse drag from the MEL script to the custom toolbar to create the little M symbol, which is my controllers selection shortcut. The M symbol on the very right is the one I created specially for the 3D platypus model.

For the keyframes, I started off with 5 keyframes. One red line represent one keyframe. The first keyframe represent the starting pose of the platypus when it walks while the fifth keyframe is the exact same pose so that the walk animation can complete its cycle. I duplicated the keyframes later on and adjusted the speed of the animation with shift click and drag function.

The area highlighted in red is the range of keyframe I have selected with shift click and drag. The arrows on the edge of the highlighted helps me adjust the speed of the animation and the middle buttons that has two triangles helps me move the keyframes to where I want it to be.

Duck Rigging

Since I already did the model of the duckling in previous weeks, I have decided to start rigging the duck.

Skeleton

Firstly, I created the skeleton for the duckling and where I think the joints would be. This is the skeleton after skin weight is applied which I will get to it later on.

Local Rotation Axis

It is important to turn on the local rotation axis for all the joints so that you know which orientation all the joints are facing. For my case, I already have a shortcut of this in my custom toolbar which is represented by the eye symbol with LRA below it.

Controllers

Since rigging is to aid animation, controllers are a must! Over here, I added controllers to IK Handlers or certain joints, depending on what kind of movement I would like the joint to make.

Skin Weight

These photos will show you why skin weights are important. As you move the wing controller, you would want only the wing to move with the controller and not the whole body of the duck. It will look deformed like this picture on the left.

I'm not very familiar with skin weights and rigging in general so I might not be able to do it perfectly, as you can see from the platypus skin weights not being perfect. I did found a very helpful video which taught me how to use component editor to zero out vertexes skin weight value tied to each respective joint.

This is how a successful skin weight looks like for the wing! It is not perfect but it works for me and allow animation to look less awkward as compared to the initial one which went with the default skin weights.