Ok, so its been 2 weeks now since my last post. Here's the update. The high-end creature rigging for AFX has been going pretty smooth. Done using a combo of muscle simulations and psd techniques, its been quite an amazing project. The test renders are looking awesome with the creatures doing some crazy stuff in the film - the AFX team rocks! These mean beasts in this flick are sure gonna be something to reckon with.
Coming back to Willa, I recently laid my hands on some motion capture animation which looked pretty decent. Past couple of days was spent on cleaning up that data since it was recorded from a character who was smaller in frame than Willa who is slightly broad shouldered being a warrior princess. Though the funny thing here is that Willa is now doing the rock and roll! Wonder if people belonging to her time and age even knew what rock and roll was all about! Now she is all ready for the next stage which is Cloth Simulaton. Once the cloth setup is done, I would be putting all these elements together and we should see a fully rendered animation of the warrior princess up online for you guys!
On the TD front, I've been putting together an auto-rigging pipeline tool which has been in progress for some time now. I've always used a combination of scripts when I do character rigging in Maya since its rarely the case where 2 characters or creatures need to do the same thing in any major production. So I've developed a set of custom scripts for different such scenarios with a permutation & combination of anatomical body parts that make up any creature.
