Animation Progress Report (Technical)

Nothing too exciting to report..  The last couple of days I've been wrestling with a pair of technical problems I was having:

1. Popping forearms

2. Needing to independently assign cage deformation to every individual muscle group.

The first problem was kind of an "Ah-HA!" moment..  I've known about it before, but didn't realize how often the issue can appear.  The problem of bones flipping around from one frame to another.  The problem was related to the order of when the software deals with each axis.  It does Heading first, Pitch second, and Bank last.  It's really just X, Y and Z but my software terms rotation like orienting an airplane.  Heading, Pitch and Bank.

Anyway, the forearms were popping at certain angle ranges.  They need to match the rotation of the wrist, but at varying amounts (more as it travels down the length of the forearm).  The twisting is on the Bank axis.  But the Bank axis is last in line to get served.  And if a bone has to rotate more than 180 degrees to find it's target, it will "pop" to choose the shortest route.  To make a long story short, I rotated the bones so they "twist" on their heading axis and poof.. Problem gone.  So my new mantra is; ALWAYS FAVOR THE HEADING.

You can see the rotated bones popping out of her forearm like a multi-compound fractures in the attached image.  It looks weird but it works perfectly.  I just hid the bones after I made this screenshot to make things tidy.

The other problem was this new rigging method with the skin sim..  I though I needed to save out each individual muscle group AND it's cage deformer as independent objects.. And then assign the cage deformer system to each matching pair of muscles and cages.  And there are going to be over 30 muscle groups.  Big pain, right?  Exactly.  Well I gave it another go with everything in one model and somehow figured it out..  Now I can keep everything in one muscle model (and just a few cage deformer models).  This is going to save a metric ton of time.  I'm so happy about this!

Finally, I have sent off the final script to my lovely voice actress and she should be delivering me the raw voice audio in a few days.  She is the same actress who did "Amy" except this time she will be using an australian accent; a talent I just recently was made aware of.  So Naomi will be a hugely muscled aussie gal.

That's it for now.  With these technical issues resolved, I expect progress will accelorate.  More to come.  Stay tuned!