Welcome

Welcome to the Inspired 3d Advanced Rigging and Deformations blog.

Readers can view the latest errata here
:ERRATA:

And of course can download the book files and errata doc at the publisher website at the link below.
:PUBLISHER WEBSITE DOWNLOADS : (link updated)
note the publisher has changed the site and the download paths mentioned in the book are no longer correct.

I realized that there was not a table of contents available for the book so I have uploaded a .PDF for any one wanting to know what we cover in detail.
:BOOK TABLE OF CONTENTS:


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Friday

New Errata coming soon and understanding corrective pose space deformations.

We got an email from a very dedicated reader that wrote up an excellent, detailed errata doc where he not only worked through problems he found in the book by figuring out the answer, he then wrote them all up and sent it to us!

We are looking over the errata as time permits and will post it once we check it out.

Thanks again to our readers for being true technical artists and finding solutions to problems presented in the book, even when they were not supposed to be problems:)

*A few notes about some of the information in the book on corrective shapes or Pose Space Deformations (PSD) rigging.
It has been brought up quite a bit over the years that the pose spaced deformations in the book don't work when you move the skeleton hiearchy above the blendshape.

This is correct, with out several extra tools /plugins creating a true PSD system with default Maya that works on a rigged character is not possible.  The book covers a workflow for creating PSD fixes that can be blended on and off over the course of a final animation, often times called shot sculpting, this workflow allows fixes for final animation that is causing deformation problems, to be corrected in a "fix it in post" system on the skeleton rig.

A point cache/geometry cache approach to this would be to cache out the mesh and in Maya Trax and Artisan , paint sculpt fix clips that can be adjusted and blended over top of the animation in a non-destructive way to fix difficult deformation issues.


Real PSD / Corrective Shape tools-

Thanks to Michael Comet and his plugins you can get this for free in Maya, with some work.
http://www.comet-cartoons.com/maya.html

you can get the latest recomplile  for Maya 2011 from DJX http://www.djx.com.au/blog/downloads/  
And find a detailed how-to  on using the Comet tools here http://www.tokeru.com/t/bin/view/Maya/MayaPoseDeformer

Another popular tool is http://www.b-ling.com/ Corrective shape tool though only for older Maya versions.

And there are several other UV driver tricks that work well for faking a true PSD solution in Maya but all of them are lacking in some way or another.


Some new tools are on the horizon that will allow for true PSD solutions on a rigged character that can also be used for post clean up as shown in this clip from JoeAlter Inc. and his Lbrush tool.





And for most people looking to set this kind of thing up, it is to deal with muscles and other tricky issues, you will want to go down the rabbit hole and check out the amazing amount of complied reference on Muscles and rigging here
http://chrisevans3d.com/reference.htm

That is it for now, Hope this helps give you all some deeper understanding of Pose Spaced Deformations

LINK: RigTip- Pickwalk Theory

I posted a short video over on the Rigging Dojo YouTube channel on how to improve rig navigation
by going beyond the standard up down custom pickwalking. You can use any of the many pickwalk scripts and tools available
but I like the zooTools pickwalk tool and demo it in this video.

LINK: #
RigTip- Pickwalk Theory

Leave a comment and let us know what you think,
Thanks,
Brad

Wednesday

It Lives, the Monster Lives

Rigging Dojo’s first full session launched this week!

If you have not been to the site or checked out all the activity on facebook you should.

It’s been about a year and a half in the making; a lot of hard work, huge learning experience, late nights and fun putting this together. Thanks to Chad and Josh and our group of friends and family that helped make it a reality. Thanks to the students for registering, really there would be no school with out students.