rigging/weighting...

yes well i er...u see...there was...this...this dog

ah i cant explain it...but to try and explain my absense on this project...the blight of contextual studies and getting a show reel ready meant john and benny had to take a back seat for a while...however now that those elements are over *drops to the floor with joy* im ready to get back on track with the clown capers :)

many of the elements i would have liked to include on this unit have had to be stripped down to the CORE NECESSITIES...or bear necessities in dans case in order for us to actually get to the animating stage. As much as i would have liked to impliment the skills i learnt last term in terms of facial control set ups, that will have to be left and instead we'll make use of the blend shape window. The rigs themselves are kept simple, but thats not to say they skip on any requirements. All handles ive insisted on putting inplace as there is NO WAY IN HELL i want to be going in there and touching the bone structure incase of accidental moving and general crud ups....which is a technical term!

the beginnings...shoulder controls, elbow and wrist.

the foot controls are gonna be a paaaaaaaaain. John has a total of 6 joints in his foot so i normal set up isnt viable...
trying out a series of locaters on the feet. This didnt work...was just causing a lot of issues so onto the next idea...(p.s it also looked a total MESS)
the final rigged character complete with FK arms, IK legs...maaaaaaany shoe FKs (i'd also tried a foot spline but that was a mess with the toe flying everywhere...so for maximum and EASE of control the individual FKs work well), spine spline, set driven keys for the fingers and root control....now i think about it...i should have done set driven keys for the feet....damn....ah well.... :P
as blend shapes don't work for the blinking of johns eyes, I'm using set driven keys again and connected the attributes to the scale Y option. the driver controls also allow for slight left to right movement and are parented to the head tip joint so that they follow the model around.
checking the arm rotations work in order for John to be able to juggle.
he's a little tea pot shooooooort and stout

working on the weights...

as well as painting the weights, influence can be removed via the component editor. However only do this if you 100% super ted certain that you do NOT need any influence on a certain area as once its set to 0, the influence cant be painted back on. This method is particularly helpful for quickly zeroing out pulling on the fingers but is useful for any other areas you no defiantly do NOT need influence from others like the feet to the body, one foot to the other, etc.

Component editor method: highlight the vertices > window > general editors > component editor > select smooth skins tab > choose desired influences > highlight and change number accordingly.

p.s has anyone else experienced this: when you bind your rig to the model the joints go slightly off centre...or what you placed them too?! I have noooo idea why it happened. Its not a major issue...more a minor annoyance.

p.p.s its strange...but i haven't been able to assign a pole vector to the knees of john...if anyone knows the answer to this PLEASE let me know, but when i assigned the pole vector constraint, it was moving the entire leg, foot included instead of just the knee....the IK handle used on the leg was a RPSolver so i have no idea why this happened. ANSWERS ON A POSTCARD GUYS!

bennys test rig with no knees...seemed to cause problems with the IK legs so this rig was scraped fooooor.......

the all new magic rig, now with KNEES! 

initial tests with the rig demonstrate the amount of influence which will need reducing/zeroing out. Areas such as the feet pull on one another can simply be zeroed using the component editor.
the breakdown of Bennys controls, created using nurbs curves and parented using the almighty MEL script.
once bound heres some more examples of bennys influence BEFORE painting weights.
since benny has no legs, the actual leg joints have a massive amount of influence on the body which will require zeroing out so the foot just slides on its own. 

After painting skin weights...

All controls are locked accordingly so that the right rotations etc are selectable and those which aren't cant be accidentally keyed. The rig and its controls are on different layers so there's no need to touch the actual joints, minimizing the risk of accidental joint movement.

nb//: unfortunately dan gave me the unscaled model of benny to rig...the model was able to be scaled back down without causing any major problems apart from the foot attributes had to be deleted :(

....now get the hell out of my office so i can animate DAMIT!