rigging

The Master Muscle List represents a quick and easy reference for accessing information on the origin, insertion, nerve supply and the action of a given muscle. Selecting an individual muscle, listed alphabetically or by anatomical region, will display an illustration of that muscle along with related functional information.

This is a custom Maya brush which makes smoothing skin weights very fast and easy to do. Because it smooths all influences at once there is not the typical normalization problem which the standard Maya smooth skin brush has (normalize = interactive). When normalization is on post, the result gets not smooth immediatley, so you would have to switch between all influences to get it really smooth. With tf_smoothSkinWeight.py you get in both situations a smooth and correct result immediately. Benefits: - smooth weights with a few strokes - saves a lot of time - weights all joints at once - no need to worry about normalization - creates a really nice and smooth weight-transition

thanks Brad for the link!

some nicely explained basics

Facial animation rigs created for the "Delgo" movie. Tutorial by Warren Grubb.

Pretty old now but some nice cartoony rigging demos.

Mouth saying "pion": http://www2.ling.su.se/staff/ericsdotter/projects/pion_fp11.htm Mouth opening wide: http://www2.ling.su.se/staff/ericsdotter/projects/big_mouth.htm

"character skinning made easy" ngSkinTools is a skinning plugin for Autodesk Maya, introducing new concepts to character skinning such as layers, any-pose-mirroring, enhanced paint brushes, true smoothing, and more. LAYERS Skinning layers are a central feature of ngSkinTools. With them, you break your rig down into easier manageable parts and edit them separately, then blend everything together through layer transparency. They're not just a simple way to make your work more organized - they also physically isolate groups of influences from the rest of the rig, so paint and edit operations won't mix-in influences you were not expecting. This also allows you do things that were impossible before: per-layer mirroring, adjusting influence weight up/down through layer transparency, blend transfered weights with previous weights, to name a few. MIRRORING You won't be needing to go to T-pose again when going through paint+mirror cycle, you can mirror in any pose now. There's also a much greater control over what influences mirror onto which one: associating left-right influences by name without prefix, manual association overrides, etc. Mirroring is also layer-friendly, so you can mirror just the parts of your model you're currently working on - very helpful, when you want to keep other parts of your rig intact. PAINTING ngSkinTools has it's own set of paint tools, which are capable of working on a per-layer basis. Each tool maintains it's own intensity, which is handy when toggling between smooth and replace through shift-modifier. Smooth is completely redesigned and you're going to just love it:) smoothing The new smooth brush gives much better results, as it operates on all influences of a vertex at once. For even greater control, the more precise "relax weights" tool is there, which also can smooth across mesh boundaries and thin meshes. COMPATIBILITY ngSkinTools operate on standard maya's skinCluster (also known as "smooth skin"), so no custom nodes will be req

video footage / reference

The animation and animation-related musings of Kevin Koch. Interesting details about eye animation in the "Eye Movements" category (with references from the BBC motion gallery website).

- improve your drawing skills - learn new techniques - see other artists work check out models > drawing tool

Interesting modular rigging approach with Flash based UI (Softimage XSI). The connection points between different modules can be chosen on-the-fly. "Unlike usual auto rig scripts, Alive lets you build your own character, limb by limb, just like a Lego system. Because all the characters don't necessarily need the same features (stretch, arm curve, roll division...), Alive lets you specify the features to apply on each limb separately."

free rigs, scripts and character setup / rigging tutorials for maya and xsi.

great human anatomy reference in videos

FaceTracker is a C/C++ API for real time generic non-rigid face alignment and tracking. Goal: Non-rigid face alignment and tracking is a common problem in computer vision. It is the front-end to many algorithms that require registration, for example face and expression recognition. However, those working on algorithms for these higher level tasks are often unfamiliar with the tools and peculiarities regarding non-rigid registration (i.e. pure machine learning scientists, psychologists, etc.). Even those directly working on face alignment and tracking often find implementing an algorithm from published work to be a daunting task, not least because baseline code against which performance claims can be assessed does not exist. As such, the goal of FaceTracker is to provide source code and pre-trained models that can be used out-of-the-box, for the dual purpose of: 1. Promoting the advancement of higher level inference algorithms that require registration. 2. Providing baseline code to promote quantitative improvements in face registration. Features: * Real time: ranging from 20-30 fps (depending on processor, compiler and use of OpenMP) * Generic: designed to work for most people under most conditions * No training required: a pre-trained model is provided * Detection based initialisation: no user intervention required * Automatic failure detection: requires no user re-initialisation * Camera or video input

Thanks Maurizio for the link!

Facial animation test including lip sync. Based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) by Dr Paul Ekman. Created with Softimage XSI by Paul Charisse (modeling, animation) and Andrea Interguglielmi (scripting).

Bryan Ewert MEL How-To's

This is a simple maya collision deformer to use with any arbitrary meshes.

thanks Brad! :)