Easy like Wednesday afternoon…
5:30 pm, May 23rd, 2007 by DanielPosted in Animation, News | No Comments »
Well, I’ve run out of stuff to do again. I would upgrade Wordpress to version 2.2 (as predicted last week), but I’m at work, so obviously firewalling and a distinct lack of FTP program are somewhat restricting. Plus I have no idea if it’s against the rules or not.
I’ve finished animating some hair that was going crazy-mad. I know it’s hardly the most interesting task you can be set, but I did get to write an awesome script (even if I do say so myself) to combat the crazy-madness.
Basically some of the hair needed baking (i.e. all the dynamic movement was recorded and stored as keyframe information) and fixing, so the script basically takes in the number of joints running down the main strands of hai and creates IK splines with a number of clusters (it has to be an approximation otherwise there’d be a hell of a lot of clusters!).
Essentially this means that you can now animate the hair using IK, rather than trying to do it in FK one every single joint, which gimbals like nobody’s business!
The second part of the script, counts through all the joints down the hair length, switches off the IK (otherwise there’ll be trouble!) and snaps the clusters to every other joint and sets a key.
This means you can exactly match the IK hair strand to the dynamic (baked) FK one. So if you’ve got any points where the hair goes a little crazy (or, more often, pokes through her face) you can IK either side of it and just blend over it, providing a very quick and easy fix!
I was very pleased with myself anyway
Oh and I bought the new Maroon 5 album this afternoon. I’ll give it a listen and let you know what I think!
