Memory Tree: Second Animation Pass, Part 1

It's far from complete but the Memory Tree has about half of it's animation fleshed out with body language. There were a couple of camera changes as per request.

The last couple of weeks have been rather overwhelming. Seeing how my first portfolio piece and my tasks for Plushy Knight coincided, I have been doing nothing but working on PK. I moved onto the fleshing out the animation a couple of days ago, working my way through the four memory sequences and, out of no where, I found myself stuck on the tire swing animation.

Two things came to my attention then. Gemma needed IK/FK switching if I wanted her hands to stay on the rope of the tire swing. I had never done IK/FK switch before and had only just learned the theory behind it. This would be my first time applying it in practice. I figured I should write a script in case incidents like this would happen in the future.

So my work on the cinematic came to a grinding halt the last couple of days. The issue wasn't making the IK/FK switch for Gemma, it was turning it onto an automated script that I could use across characters.

I am no tech artist. My script probably won't work on anyone else's rig except my own, but a great majority of PK's rigs are mine anyway. Currently it generates the two skeletons (FK, IK) for the main skeleton to bind to, creates the IK handles for the IK arms, connects everything to their respective controllers and then generates set driven keys for the FK IK blend. This does require some adjustments to my original rig which I planned on adding to my script but I had already done those adjustments by hand so it never really made it in. I had already spent two days trying to get this rig to work anyway so I figured I better not waste any more time on this.

All so Gemma's hands can stay on the tire swing. :[

On the other hand, I learned about the 'substitute' command. When used in conjunction with the rename command it mimics maya's Search and Replace Name command which is nice since the searchReplaceNames command doesn't seem to work.