Cooper's file turned out too slow for animation... and impossible to render. I wasn't happy with many things about him anyway. Like the texturing and the hair - which was finally done with paint effects - they didn't make it to final render unfortunately... The file was slow to load and save - somewhere around 10 minutes (!!!). Insane, yeah, and I don't know why... but it seems like Maya didn't like when I separated the head from the body geometry and then reattached it... and it didn't like the huge web of outputs that followed - wrap deformers, nCloth, face setup... and even though the face setup was on a different geometry, which was connected through blendshape to the main body, even when I disconnected all the wraps and the face blendshape, Maya still barely moved, and only when hiding the clothes and face rig, it managed to evaluate the body rig at only around 5 fps. Also, I had problems with the render output (save all animation as geometry cache), which turned out to be buggy, seems like because of that same head being detached and reattached... Hell if I do that again! It gave me problems with UV layout, texturing, slowed everything down I believe, and finally made the render impossible. Next time I'm gonna have to try to find a simpler way...
On the other hand, the facial setup turned out as expected. I used to use Artificial Actors Toolset in the past, which is great, but it doesn't give me cartoony shape control over things, like the eyebrows or mouth. My setup is more suited for cartoony characters, and it's faster to setup (but could use some more cleanup in term of efficiency). Both setups though are far from realtime... so now I'm researching things for a setup with clusters or chains of joints on the face... might not be so fast to paint weights, but it should be much closer to realtime. In fact, my current quest tries to achieve realtime 24fps in both body and face rig. Even if I have to transfer animation between files and keep the rigs separate.
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About me
I'm a character animator, visual artist, game dev, and music composer. I like to doodle, write, experiment, and plan my next big thing. I love tech that inspires and enables art. I have a formal background in music composition. And I like to walk around the world and see things up close. Archives
September 2021
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