Character Model Finished

give that man a cigar! damn fine first character model!!! :D :D
were you following along with tutorials or just figuring it out for yourself?

Hey thanks moonunit! I used this tutorial for the body:
http://www.planetunreal.com/mentallic/Tutorial/Tute1Page3.html

and I used this tutorial for the head:
http://www.maya3d.dk/Tutorials/HeadModeling/HeadModeling.htm

Because the techniques were really basic it allowed me to adapt it to anything I wanted to model.

I have a question about animating. I was told that having triangles is bad for rigging/animation since they don't collapse/deform well and quads are better. But I've also heard that for game models people use the triangulate function on their models after completing them? Why is this? And why do so if triangles are bad for animating/deformation?

Any help is appreciated :)

Wow, that looks good for a first model. Congrats on getting it finished :)
Some parts of the hair could have been done using planes, so that you could have transparency for hairstrands and stuff, plus you will save polies.
I wont answer your question about quads VS triangles as I might be wrong and there are far more experienced artists that can answer it better then I can. Sorry :)

Thanks for the links too btw

Hey Makk, thanks for your comments. Next time I do a model I will use planes, I'm seriously running out of time to get this model done and rigged!

Anyway I'm in the middle of rigging and am having a weird thing appear in my skeleton:

[img]http://users.bigpond.com/jason129/armrig.jpg[/img]

What is that bone that is sticking out when I select the IK handle? Is it anything serious? Will it cause me problems later, should I redraw the joints to keep it clean?

Any advice appreciated!

Cool model.

Did you use a pre-made skeleton system (Bonus Game or something like IK Joe)? It looks like the IK handle has FK/IK blending enabled on it, and that is just an easy way to select the node.

Thanks Aven, I made the skeleton myself. Hmm I'm not sure if it's just an easy way to select the IK handles because it only appears when I've actually selected the handle. When I deselect it goes away. Is that what you mean?

Has anyone else seen something like this?

If not I might just redraw the arm joint.

I'd have to guess but it looks like you have an IK/FK switch setup on the arms, but its you're rig how come you don't know?

Malus - Jason said in his first post that it was his first character model. Making a character rig in Maya isn't the most simple thing to do. Especially compared to Biped. There are about four dozen buttons and they all have about a dozen values in the options. Plenty of things can go wrong.

Jason - Sorry. I couldn't help you out more. The last time I tried IK/FK blending was in Maya 4 using a custom rig tute (and I never really used the rig), so I am not too sure what is going on. My friend and I tried it out all morning. After having many disagreements, we don't really know what is wrong.

What happens is when you create an IK Handle in Maya, it now automatically creates two ghost bone chains that will store the IK and FK animation. You will animate using the main bone system, and the animation will feed through onto the two ghosts. You can then blend the main bone to go between the two bone systems that have their animation derived from the bone system that you are now blending. I hope that makes very little sense, as I am still confused by it :p So the addition of those two bone systems is not unusual (although Maya 6 will hide them until you start doing blending). What is unusual and confusing us is that we are unsure why neither of the ghost bones is following the main system. Here is a test that I did:

[img]http://home.netspeed.com.au/mlanham/tutes/FK_IK.jpg[/img]

You can see that the IK ghost is attached to the main bone system as the blend is set to IK. The FK ghost is off at a different state so that I can blend back to it if I ever need to. Now the main bone can be detached from the two ghosts, beut only when the IK Handle has a blend state between 0 and 1 (but not 0 or 1 of course). Here is a pic:

[img]http://home.netspeed.com.au/mlanham/tutes/FK_IK_02.jpg[/img]

With your example you have the main bone coming off at a completely different angle to both of the ghosts. SO I have absolutely no idea what is wrong. You can try to check that there aren't any keys set on any of the joints or the IK Handle. Make sure that you haven't disabled your IK Solver. If those things don't work, then just delete the arm and start again. It shouldn't take too long.

Although I haven't done it in ages, I always found that creating the skeleton, rigging it and then adding in the IK Handles later on worked a little better for me. I did this, as it allows you to just grab joints and rotate them to see how the skin weights are going, and not have to worry about IK chains going out on you. Just practice, and try some different things to see what works.

I'd personally clean it up(delete and remake that arm bit), with max, i remember exporting a bone rigged character and somehow during export it created an extra bone and screwed around with my anims, (I think the mirror tool glitched or something), but just to be safe I'd kill that arm bone and make a fresh one.

Aven: Just about to start learning Maya, I've had a bit of a play a while bak but that was with 4.5.

I just thought that if he had an FK/IK setup it would be something he had intended therefore he would know, I didn't realise Maya rigs defaulted to enabling FK/IK switching, haven't got that far yet [:P], cool feature.

Hey aven, thanks so much for your help, I really appreciate it!

You said: " Make sure that you haven't disabled your IK Solver."

I don't even know that you can disable it. So I'm pretty sure i didn't. I had a very general grasp of what your were describing, IE: how the bones work with the ghosts etc. But still a little confused.

I ended up just redrawing the arm joints. Hopefully they wont go out of whack this time.... But yeah, thanks again for the help :)

Ok I think I figured out why it's happening. Well I can't explain it but when I select the elbow joint and in the attribute box I go to the 'degrees of freedom' tickboxes. I turn off freedom in the X and Z axis, so the elbow can only move in the Y axis (like a real elbow joint)

Then when I grab the IK handle to test the new movement, that ghost joint separates....

For some reason it doesn't like only 1 degree of freedom. Only when X, Y and Z are selected that it acts normally. hmmm.