Advanced Skeleton 5 Face Rig Issues, Need help!
greentooth
Hi all!
I've been working on a character art project, and decided learning how to make a basic rig for a simple idle animation would be a big plus for my portfolio and for presentation. Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya was recommended to me and it's been working fine. I've rigged the whole body and painted the weighting, happy with all that. But I'm having trouble with the face rig.
Eyes work fine, as expected (however ONLY When the eye locator is placed on the character's left, pivot problem somehow?):
However after that step, blink doesn't have any effect:
The squint step seem to be working?:
Next, no brow rigging working
And finally, it hangs and throws up an error on the lips stage and I can't continue past: (Command attachCurve failed)
This is my first experience with rigging to this level of detail, and I'd really like to have her animated rather than a static pose. Can anyone help me with what's going wrong here?
I've been working on a character art project, and decided learning how to make a basic rig for a simple idle animation would be a big plus for my portfolio and for presentation. Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya was recommended to me and it's been working fine. I've rigged the whole body and painted the weighting, happy with all that. But I'm having trouble with the face rig.
Eyes work fine, as expected (however ONLY When the eye locator is placed on the character's left, pivot problem somehow?):
However after that step, blink doesn't have any effect:
The squint step seem to be working?:
Next, no brow rigging working
And finally, it hangs and throws up an error on the lips stage and I can't continue past: (Command attachCurve failed)
This is my first experience with rigging to this level of detail, and I'd really like to have her animated rather than a static pose. Can anyone help me with what's going wrong here?
Replies
If you are looking to be able to rig and animate yor characters I'd suggest you take a look at mGear - http://www.mgear-framework.com/. It's a very robust and powerful open source rigging system. mGear forum is very helpful, the devs are almost always there to help and there are some great tutorials on Gumroad - https://gumroad.com/miquelcampos. And there's an official Youtube channel aswell.
Which is why AS offers another way to rig faces that works a bit better with realtime.
~5:55
The second way uses joints and driven controllers to create attributes that drive the positions of joints. It's not as animation friendly or feature robust as the complex face setup, but realtime rigs can't use that stuff and you're just creating poses, it probably does all you need to.
Also that video above goes over both methods. The first half covers the complex system and then stripping it down for realtime. I use the second method, it might be worth investigating.
I will also echo Anton Boiko that Advance Skeleton is a fairly complex somewhat closed box rigging solution and the only person that can debug it is the guy that maintains it. If you have a license, he usually does help. If you don't, he might look into the bugs, but he might be busy attending to other important bugs.
One important step that I take with Advance skeleton is that I save out a "builder file". Its a file that has never been built, it's just the fit skeleton and its where I do all of the pre-building steps. That way I can always go back to a clean file and start over if it ever starts going haywire.
The actual rig is saved in another "rig file" and that has all of the controllers built and styled, plus custom edits I do specific to my process and the games I'm working on.
Any steps that require pre-building steps I go back to the build file and then recreate the rig file. I wrote scripts to automate that process but you can do the same manually.
ALSO know, that the more back and forth changes you make between fit skeleton and built rig it tends to become more unstable and will have some clutter nodes sitting around that have to be dealt with. It really depends on the version that you're using and how you're using it. Each version has some quirks that you end up working around.
If the rig ever breaks or starts glitching out, like it's doing here, it probably due to changes during a rebuild. To FIX that, you can save out the fit skeleton (through the tool), save out your skin weights (through maya) and start over from scratch in a fresh scene. It is much more stable if you build it once rather than rebuilding it a bunch of times.
mGear is decent, but it kind of has a steep learning curve and a bit more like automated manual rigging. Isn't as streamlined or straight forward as AS. It's great, I wouldn't mind using it one bit if I started working somewhere that used it. It's a great tool, but it is more manual labor and a bit harder for new people to adapt to which means training people to use it is a bit of a pain. AS I just point them at a handful of videos and they usually pick it up pretty quick.