Niomi Campbell (WIP)

[sonofpat]

side

[sonofpat]

Hands

[SteelShark]

How did you get her to stand with her arms outstretched for the rotoscope?

[sonofpat]

Hi all

 

while rigging Niomi I came up with a simple, but very effective way of making realictic joints in animatiion master without smart skin or weights.

 

Since a picture paints a thousand words, the movies at the top of the

following page gives an idea of the final results.

 

http://free.hostdepartment.com/s/sonofpat/shoulders.html

 

Luv

 

Pat

[sonofpat]

So what are good joints made of in AM? The answer is simple - skin, bones and "skinbones". Let's start with the skin as seen in the image below.

 

THE SKIN:

 

The most important part is the shoulder ring as shown. In general, I tried to keep the splines as simple as possible for animation while providing details needed for the upper arm.

[sonofpat]

THE BONES:

The bones as seen in the image below are the biceps and shoulder bones which function as levers in the traditional sence of bones.

 

Note the lowered position of the biceps. This allows the arm to pivot in a more natural position when it is at the side.

 

THE 'SKINBONES':

 

These are intermediate bones that are children of the shoulder bones and are oriented in such a way that the CPs they are connected to mimic the skin at the joint as the limb rotates in different positions. When the biceps are at the side, those at the top rotate more, when the arm is extended outward, those at the back rotate more etc.

[sonofpat]

A bird's eye view of the shoulder ring and the skinbones that control it are shown for clarity

[sonofpat]

Here's a top view. Note the forward position of the biceps. This allows the arm to pivot in a more natural position when it is extended forward.

[sonofpat]

THE SETUP:

The skin bones each have an orient-like constraint to the biceps with enforcement varying from 50% at the very top and back to 15% below the armpit in the back and front. The position of the root of each of these bones were tweeked to get the desired movement of the mesh. That's all for now. If I can find the time I will probably write a proper tutorial

 

 

BTW I call this the skinbone joint set up.

[SteelShark]

Nice setup and explanation.

 

Now, is it possible to do the same thing with CP weights? Or does the ring get too distorted?

[sonofpat]

Hi Steelshark,

 

I do not have version 11 as yet so I have not been able to play with the new implementation of CP weights. However I don't see why it may not be possible to duplicate the rig using weights.

 

The only drawback I see to using cp weight is that their pivots cannot be adjusted as needs be as bones can, for eg, if you look at my setup, the bone at the front of the armpit is short and doesn't pivot very much because the cp (skin) it controts does not move very much whereas the bone at the top is long because the skin it controls stretches a lot when the arm hangs down.

 

A possible work around may be in te position of the biceps as suggested in my rig.

My upgrade is due at the end of the month maybe I will give it a shot.

 

 

luv

 

Pat

[sonofpat]

You can see the rig in action @

 

http://free.hostdepartment.com/s/sonofpat/shoulders.html

 

There are two flash movies at the top of the page. One shows the arm bieng lifted

from the front view and the other shows how the shoulder rotates in the side view.

 

luv

 

Pat

[Far Star Productions]

Very nice work on tutorial and yes this system works great! This is very similar to the 3D artz cog set up minus a lot of neat rig tricks to give the shoulder a more natural movement automatically by using uler limits. It is far to complicated to go into but if interested you should check out the cd tutorial. It is well worth the money.

http://www.3dartz.com

[sonofpat]

Thanks JacK,

 

I am interested cog cd in because I only hear good things about it.However I will not purchase it just yet because to do so now will defeat the goal of the Niomi project which is to push my skills in modelling,texturing,rigging and character animation to the higgest and share what I have learned with AM community.The effort is slooow in coming but is paying big dividends for me of which the rig is one.I don't know what new discoveries I will make but with your encouragement I will keep pushing

 

Luv

Pat

[sonofpat]

Hi again,

 

I am hoping to post a simple model with the rig I am developing

for Niomi at the tutorial site.

 

My plan is to do a tut each key joint and post the model at the

end.

 

However I was asked to post the shoulder so others can play

with.So here it is.It is a simplified cartoon model but the principle

is the same.

 

 

Luv

Pat

Shoulder.mdl

[c-wheeler]

Thanks Pat

I shall now have a little play!

[sonofpat]

Hi again,

 

I have uploaded a tutorial that shows how naomi hip was setup @

 

http://free.hostdepartment.com/s/sonofpat/Hips.html

 

The strengths of this setup are once it done you do not have to keyframe the

mesh at different bone angles and you can accurately control the movement

of the cps as the joint moves.

 

Some feedback would be appreciated.

 

Luv

 

Pat

[ypoissant]

Pat,

 

Nice tutorial you did there. I wanted to encourage you in pursuing your quest for knowledge. You are definitely on the right track. You know your "skin bones" are what we used to call "Fan bones". The beauty of this approach is that it does not force you to model in one specific way. So you can model in a realistic way and still use the fan bones in all their glorious generality.

 

I've followed your progression on Naomi through the months and I can see that you are, indeed progressing quite well.

 

Keep up the good work.

[sonofpat]

Thank you Yves

 

A compliment from you means a lot to me because I have immence respect your CG skills and not to mention the tremendous contribution that you have made to the AM community.

 

The Naomi project is running behind right now because my system suffered a literal burn out - surge protector and all. This chewed up all my money for AM upgrade, and books such as Stop Steering, etc; and really sapped my ego at one point in time.

 

Thankfully, the project was backed up, so I was able to get up and running from where I'd left off. I am still doing battle with the local shipping company to recover the cost of undelivered equipment.

 

So a word of cheer amidst all of this, really lit me up.

 

Over the weekend, I wil be uploading the final installation of the "joint rig" tutorial. This time on knees and elbows. The approach here is completely different to anything I've ever seen and I will love some feedback from you when it is posted.

 

Thanks again

 

Luv Pat

[sonofpat]

Hi again,

 

Just uploaded a tutorial on the rigging of niomi's hinge joints@

 

http://free.hostdepartment.com/s/sonofpat/Elbows.html

 

 

All comments are welcomed

 

LUV

Pat

[sonofpat]

Hi again,

 

Just uploaded a tutorial on the rigging of niomi's fingers@

 

http://free.hostdepartment.com/s/sonofpat/Fingers.html

 

 

All comments are welcomed.

 

 

LUV

Pat

[sonofpat]

I have just finished building a facial rig for Niomi.

It consist of a series of poses that some what mimic the muscles of the face

Which was inspired by this article @

 

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000414/lander_01.htm

 

among others.

 

These poses are driven by a "funky user interface" as seen in other software

packages.

 

The core of the interface is made up bones and nulls whose translation

and rotation drives the poses.This I learnt from Bill Young's visime project.

(Thanks Bill).These are arranged to make animation as intuitive as possible.

 

An outline of the model is used as a guide for animating on the fly.

 

I intend to use this in conjunction with the traditional phonemes and

expression.

 

Here is an image that should make things clearer

 

 

A tutorial version of the rig is also attached below.Please give it a try

and tell me how it can be improved.

 

I will do a full blown tutorial for newbies when I have the time but I am preoccupied with finishing Niomi right now.

 

LUV

Pat

FaceRig.prj

[sonofpat]

Hi everyone,

 

I'll be finishing Naomi by next week and I'm quite pleased with the way she's turned out. Here is a sneak peak of how she's coming along.

 

 

As usual, all comments and criticisms are welcomed.

 

Luv

 

Pat

[starwarsguy]

great work!

[Pengy]

She turned out very nice. Thank you for the tutorials very informative. I like the belly tattoo she has nice touch

[JTalbotski]

Nice work, Pat! She's got a familiar-looking tatoo near her navel. Very nice texturing and lighting, too.

 

Two crits only. Her hands are really (really) large. And her elbow became too thin when it bent. Otherwise...super!

 

Jim

[Rodney]

Whoa Pat!

I've missed your last few updates and you've really updated her!!!

Very Very nice!

 

 

The only possible critique I can come up with is that the hand(s) look to big in your last pic.... for some reason it looks entirely too big...

 

But that is a 'small' quibble.

Very good work!

 

Rodney

 

*Ooops.. I see Jim beat me to the big hand assessment. I feel smarter now thanks to Jim though.

[mtpeak2]

Pretty impressive Pat, As Jim stated the hands and the elbows. Maybe scaling the hands down will help the elbows.

[sonofpat]

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions.

 

I have resized and tilted the hand and played wih the elbow which made a great improvement as you can see

 

 

 

 

The elbow and forearm may still need a little work.

 

 

I am going for the realistic head and stylized body look, because I want the model to look more elegant and sexy than a real person. I haven't quite pinned down the body as yet - as you all saw the hands were way too big and the elbows too narrow along with the other issue raised. So I still have some tweaking to do.

 

 

I am trying to texture the hand and the body right now, so more changes will come later.

 

 

Luv

Pat

[ypoissant]

You've worked hard and the result is nice as a whole. Does the shading comes mostly from lighting or from texturing?

 

A good rule of thumb for the size of the forearm as it goes into the upper arm as it folds is to get it as wide as the bicep part of the upper arm. Right now, even though it is better sized than the previous post, it is still too tiny. The reason is because the forearm brachioradialis muscle attaches quite high into the upper arm in order to have a lever effect when it raises the forearm.

 

I don't really have a problem with large hands, especially if you go for a styliized body look, because the large hands can be used more efficiently for expressive effects. This said, to my eyes, the large hand effect is given from the seemingly long fingers. I think the valleys between the fingers on the palm are too advanced into the hand (Sorry for the wording. This is a situation where my english fails me).

 

Compositionally speaking, I would position her more toward the left of the image. A good rule of thumb is the golden proportion which is 3/8. And add a blurred background, another quick trick to enhance your render.

[sonofpat]

Shame on you Yves, you don't know your own skylight riggs when you see them

in action :-) ,heh heh heh.

 

Yes that shading is mainly a combination of your skylight 25 along with

Gary Martins ambient rim material that Ed Lynch gave me sometime ago.

This along with all the help am getting from you guys makes Naiomi a real

AM community gal.

 

I played with the default lights in the cho until I go smiting I liked.Then

I dropped in your skylight rig and reduced the intensity of all the lights to

compensate for the over exposure caused by the sky lights.The clothes

have patch images for bump and color maps.

 

I was going for natural lighting without the washed out look that a lot

of sky lit images have.I do not much ability in terms of lighting so I was

completely blown away when I saw the first test render.

 

As for the composition here is the latest image.

 

 

I still have to tweak the fingers.

 

Thank you for all your great advice.

 

LUV

Pat

[ypoissant]

Yes, I understand what you mean by the natural lighting.

 

The outdoor sunny lighting look comes from the bluish surrounding light that comes from the sky and a yellowish light that comes from the sun.

 

The easiest way to get this effect is with 3 lights:

1 yellowish sun light (I like to use a bulb for that)

1 bluish skylight light

1 bluish negative sun light (I like to use a bulb for that)

 

The main idea is to set the bluish and the yellowish lights at the exact opposite spectrum on the hue weel. You could use a straight yellow sun light or to get a warmer light lean a tiny bit toward orange and to get a hot light, lean more agressively toward orange. The saturation is maximum and the lightness is about 80%.

 

Once you have selected your yellow for the sun, you now set your skylight light and your negative sun light to the exact opposite bluish color on the hue weel. Again maximum saturation and about 80% lightness.

 

Of course, as you mentionned, you have to reduce the skylight light intensity. First I turn OFF the sun and the negative sun lights and adjust the skylight light intensity so that I still have nice shape shade definition but rather with about 1/3 or 1/2 the normal lighting intensity I would use with the slylight alone.

 

Now here is the trick: Turn ON both the sun light and the negative sun light. In choreography, on the negative sun, add translate and orient like constraints like the sun. On the Negative Sun attributes, set the intensity to minus 10%. Then adjust the (positive) sun intensity to get a nice bright light with clearly visible shadows. Some overexposure can help convey the feeling of the sunny day.

 

The negative bluish sun trick is to help enhance the bluish shadows vs the yellowish lights. The negative sun will remove some of the blue shades coming from the skylight where the yellowish sun should hit. By playing with the sun vs negative sun intensity, you can enhance this effect even further (but don't overdo it). My goal, with such a setup is to approach the lightings achieved by some painters (the Hildebrandt brothers or Maxfield Parish are notable examples).

 

Another critique, is that the background you've choosen is rather monotone with the regular brick pattern. You could get better result by taking a photograph of a backstreet and blurring it almost beyond recognition. Beside, the bricks are rather large compared to the model in front.

[sonofpat]

Yves for some strange reason I've been having a little trouble with my

favourite 3d software when I first tried your natural light setup.I was

getting good quick renders in the cho but when I rendered to a file

the image was much darker than it should be. I suspect the project

file may have become corrupted in some way because eventually

it caused AM(10.5) to crash every time it was loaded.

After having this problem with two versions of the project I became

desperate yesterday and was about to post screen captures so you

could see. However AM finally settled on the third attempt of the project

late yesterday afternoon so I can now show off a naturally lit Naiomi.

 

 

 

I used spotlights instead of bulbs because they seem to give

me greater control over the shadows. I had to change the specularity

in the model and the hair fell apart with this lighting.

Despite this I am pleased with how it is turning out and your setup

is now a prized addition to my little bag of 3D tricks.

 

Thank you once again for making a better cg artist out of me.

 

For those who have not seen my indoor version here it is.

 

 

I consider the first part of the Naiomi Campbell project and I will

like to thank everyone supported me despite the entish (tree beard)

approach I took to it.

 

I will now move on to animating her. That will have to wait for now

because I want to refine my animation skills first. In addition I have

a few outstanding rigging tutorials from the project and a face to

finish for the list. To top this off my vacation ended yesterday.

 

It may take sometime but I will finnish the project. In the meantime

keep an eye out for my animation "lab rat" ole Joe in this part of the

forum.

 

Thanks again

Luv

Pat

[ypoissant]

Pat,

 

You must have a bandwidth limit on your domain because it is the second tiem I come here and I can't see your pictures. I will come back later.

[sonofpat]

sorry about that.

Here they are

 

1 natural light

[ypoissant]

The skin looks better in the last one. In the previous one, the skin looked more like bronze.

 

One last little suggestion: Try to blur the background image so that the blur width is larger as the photo progresses in depth. Right now, this uniform blur does not look natural. I don't know how I would do that though

[sonofpat]

2 indoor. this is the one on the cgtalk forum,

[luckbat]

Try to blur the background image so that the blur width is larger as the photo progresses in depth. Right now, this uniform blur does not look natural. I don't know how I would do that though.

 

Actually, Photoshop 8 has a "Lens Blur" filter that can selectively blur an image based on a mask layer. Using a simple left-to-right gradient in this case would probably do the trick.

[AMAR]

that can also be done with a reg gaussian blur and a layer mask going from dark to light using the default color settings with black first and white second.

 

You can tweak the midpoint slider to determine were the lighter diffusion of the blur will occur.

[sonofpat]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I had to use gaussian blur since I use the gimp.

 

 

Steps

 

1.Rectangular selection

2.Feather

3.gaussian blur

4.selection expand

5.repeat 3 and 4 until satisfied

 

The effect is best seen in on the yellow road line

on the left

 

 

Luv

Pat

[sonofpat]

Tweaked the upper arm,elbows and right hand as suggested by the

members of the cgtalk forum.

 

 

 

 

 

comments are welcomed

[sonofpat]

Naomi is in the finished work forum of cgtalk

 

 

see a larger image of her @

 

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=167581

 

 

Now lets put her on the front page ;-)

 

(Shameless plug)