Please join us in welcoming Darius, the newest member of our weft family! Darius is a highly expressive rig, permitting our students to create powerful and engaging performances. We can’t wait to see the stories he’ll star in!
Students can get wangle to this heady new weft whence in our Introduction to Acting course. Alumni of our Weft Volatility Courses are encouraged to requite Darius a try as well!
Interested in learning increasingly well-nigh the megacosm process for Darius? Alimony reading!
Meet the Creative Team
Say hello to the creative team overdue Darius! Thank you to these talented artists for helping us bring this weft to life:
- Character Designer: Eduardo Gilsanz. We’ve loved working with Eduardo and it was his diamond that first brought Darius to life.
- 3D Modeler: Ander Liza. We’ve worked with Ander on the zillion of our weft models: Aia, Jules, Imps, Stan, Stewart, Stella, Viktor, Moya, Aristotle, etc. You can see increasingly of his work on Instagram.
- Rigger: Joshua Cote. Joshua rigged Viktor, Moya, and Aristotle surpassing moving on to work at Blue Sky Studios and Infinity Ward. You can see increasingly of his work on Instagram.
We asked our creative team some in-depth questions well-nigh the rig megacosm process. Their answers might surprise you!
Designing a 3D Character
Animation Mentor: Where did the idea for Darius come from? What inspired the initial diamond for this character?
Eduardo Gilsanz: The idea for Darius came from a personal project I wanted to do well-nigh the origins of jazz culture and African American culture. The diamond is inspired by the 1910s and 1920s in the U.S. I have a lot of interest in old photographs from those decades and that culture feels so authentic. I have unchangingly liked the designs of that era; the diamond of the cars, the elegance of the gown (suits, dresses), but moreover the atmosphere, the architecture, the bars, and the music. In general, the stimulating of that era is very inspiring for me and I wanted to do something with all that. Darius was perhaps the starting point.
AM: What was unique well-nigh designing this character?
I wanted to try something variegated in my work process for this design. I usually work a lot with line drawing and for Darius I tried a variegated way and worked directly with verisimilitude and texture without making line sketches. I think that for me and my own learning, this was the special thing well-nigh the design, that much of the exploration of the weft and the final diamond was made only with verisimilitude stains, not line drawing.
AM: What was the inspiration for Darius’ style?
Apart from the 20s influence, the style I was looking for was something increasingly realistic. I have unchangingly liked a increasingly cartoony style, but I wanted to try something increasingly contained in terms of forms and increasingly realistic in terms of textures and proportions.
I designed this weft with the idea of making him in 3D. I was looking for something graphic and stylized, but with the idea of rendering him in 3D with realistic finishes and textures.
I saw Darius as a weft with a strong personality. He was a serious person, a businessman who was successful, but not unprepossessed and calculating. In the whence of my process, he was going to be increasingly windbag and superficial, but the incubation of the weft was towards someone empathetic. That’s why, in terms of shapes and proportions, Darius is inspired by square and weedy shapes.
Modeling a 3D Character
Animation Mentor: What is your process for modeling a weft like this? Where do you begin?
Ander Liza: When I modeled Darius I was very lucky considering I loved the diamond my friend Eduardo made from the beginning. My first step was to gather references of the same shape language, of a very graphical character. The next thing I did was to sculpt a neutral bust.
After that, I modeled a vital T pose. When I did Darius in the hero pose, that’s when I really found who he was. I made a lot of tweaks to the weft in the final pose to match the essence from the design. After that, I took that weft and I neutralized him and cleaned him up for rigging.
AM: What speciality of the diamond did you finger was most hair-trigger to capture during the modeling process?
AL: The diamond was very graphic and the proportions were very stylized. Making that work in 3D as well as in the original 2D diamond was the most difficult thing to do.
Rigging a 3D Character
Animation Mentor: What was the most difficult part of rigging Darius?
Joshua Cote: The most difficult part well-nigh rigging Darius was figuring out how to future proof the rig using an Offset Parent Matrix setup. A conventional rig typically uses Autodesk Maya’s native constraint nodes (parent, point, orient, and scale constraints) to momentum the main joint/control rig. Autodesk has just opened up the Offset Parent Matrix setup to artists that are looking to flatten the rig hierarchy and ultimately try to speed up the rig. I’ve had a little exposure to this kind of setup at Blue Sky Studios. To this day I’m still learning well-nigh matrices and the math overdue them.
At Blue Sky, we had a proprietary transform with a matrix input that we used to build our rigs. Our studio had a major hand in helping Autodesk put this full-length into their new symbol setup. Unfortunately, with this full-length stuff completely new there’s veritably no documentation on how to build a rig using this setup and it’s not streamlined for user-friendliness. Plus, a majority of Autodesk workflows utilize matrix drivers to move pose-space deformations, making it a lot harder to provide volitional workflows.
Ultimately, I had to create my own pose reader to make this Offset Parent Matrix setup work. There’s a requirement that this new symbol will remove the scramble of the graph considering it removes the constraint nodes and their setup, but it isn’t entirely true. I would oppose that it’s a bit increasingly complicated to set up a matrix rig. But as you would imagine, once you find the formula you can make a script for it.
AM: What was the most fun?
JC: What I found most fun well-nigh this rig, as in a majority of my rigs, is the squatter setup. People relate to the squatter the most on any character. It’s how we communicate. I love the process of facial rigging, it gives me a endangerment to sculpt and make fun expressions. If the art diamond allows it, making facial rigs that are fleshy is most gratifying. Hopefully, people will finger the same with this new character.
AM: What’s something well-nigh the rigging process that would surprise people?
JC: Other than the Offset Parent Matrix setup, there’s not a lot in this rig that would come as a surprise for people.
But I don’t think people fully understand the full telescopic of how much work goes into a weft rig. From the very beginning, in order for us to fully understand the requirements of the character, we would need to discuss with the weft designer/director to get their vision of range of motion (face and body). This information is vital for a rigger considering it helps us optimize our time and plan out the rig functionality.
Riggers have to assess the model to see if it can deform properly, making sure the vertex/edge loops are placed properly. Once that has been established and the model has been updated to deformation requirements, we are worldly-wise tp get started with the rigging process.
The rigging process includes:
- Placing the joints with their orientations and correct rotation order (because animators hate getting gimbal locking).
- Creating the controls and their attributes. We have to diamond the rig for mirroring capabilities.
- Constraining those controls to the rig hierarchy. For Darius, I had to icon out matrix math operations for constraining.
- Programming. Figuring out what areas of the rig will momentum other components of the rig.
- Hundreds of math node operations to preserve volume in the limbs, including lip zippering.
- Additive joints to go vastitude the wiring rig functionality (e.g. rivet rig on lips).
- Develop wiring skin weights that will provide a foundation for touching-up shapes.
- Making sure the MoveAll tenancy scales every rig component properly with no stray vertices.
- Because of the matrix constraint setup, I had to develop a new pose reader. Unfortunately, Autodesk doesn’t support this new system with their own pose reader.
- Sculpting hundreds of wiring touching-up shapes. Once you have the wiring layer, you can start making philharmonic correctives when multiple poses are triggered.
- Scripting rig functions for suit switches and IK/FK snapping.
- Fixing bugs. On top of all this, there will unchangingly be requests and notes for bug fixes. If there are requests on the squatter shapes, you would really need to alimony track of the wiring dependencies so it doesn’t mess with your previously tried shapes.
- Finally, rig polishing. Making sure everything that’s seen by the user is intended for them to use.
Phew! Did you take notes?
We hope you enjoyed walking through the weft megacosm process for our newest rig! Alimony an eye on our social media (@animationmentor) to see the stories students tell with Darius.
The post Meet Darius: The Newest Volatility Mentor Character appeared first on AM Blog.
.webp)
