The rig is almost done. I still need to add some influence objects in his fingers and shoulders to help them retain their shape when the joints bend. I also want to do a blend shape that turns his mustache up or down according to mood. I've hidden the extra parts here and put him in xray mode so you can see the skeleton and controls better. Did you know a potato has knees?
I got desperate this weekend trying to get the rig to work and decided that one way or another I was going to get those Maya 3 files open. So I tracked down my old Maya CD (I really do keep everything) and installed it on my Dell laptop running XP. I wasn't sure if it was going to work considering I used to run it under NT, but it did work and I was in business. I grabbed the files I got off backup a few days ago and tried to open one... error. And that told me it wasn't a Maya version problem, it was a file corruption problem. I would have given up at that point except that when I was digging for the Maya CD I also found all my animation files on CD. So I had another copy of them backed up directly to CD from Windows. Those files worked in both versions. Within minutes I was looking at the rig I had been needing all along.
You know what? That rig wasn't that great. But it gave me a place to start and now I have a working rig for the potato. Note to self: Don't back up Windows files using Mac OS9. Not that OS9 is an option anymore, but lesson learned. (When in doubt, zip your files first.)
So I have less than three weeks left and ideally I need to have something on my site in about one week, so as much as I hate it I've had to make a hard decision. Considering what I want to do in this field is lighting, animation is not my priority. I like following the logical order of production but in this case I need rendered images and I need them fast. So I will set the bar a little lower and hope I can fly over it. I'm going to use the rig to pose the potato in three key static poses (one from each scene), and then texture and light the hell out of them. Worst case, I'll have three really good rendered images on my site before SIGGRAPH. Best case, I'll get that done in a week and go ahead and animate it as the last step. I'm not expecting that to happen though (at least not to my high standards) so I'm going to put the bulk of my remaining energy into texturing and lighting. And I'm going to try not to be mad about it.
I got desperate this weekend trying to get the rig to work and decided that one way or another I was going to get those Maya 3 files open. So I tracked down my old Maya CD (I really do keep everything) and installed it on my Dell laptop running XP. I wasn't sure if it was going to work considering I used to run it under NT, but it did work and I was in business. I grabbed the files I got off backup a few days ago and tried to open one... error. And that told me it wasn't a Maya version problem, it was a file corruption problem. I would have given up at that point except that when I was digging for the Maya CD I also found all my animation files on CD. So I had another copy of them backed up directly to CD from Windows. Those files worked in both versions. Within minutes I was looking at the rig I had been needing all along.You know what? That rig wasn't that great. But it gave me a place to start and now I have a working rig for the potato. Note to self: Don't back up Windows files using Mac OS9. Not that OS9 is an option anymore, but lesson learned. (When in doubt, zip your files first.)
So I have less than three weeks left and ideally I need to have something on my site in about one week, so as much as I hate it I've had to make a hard decision. Considering what I want to do in this field is lighting, animation is not my priority. I like following the logical order of production but in this case I need rendered images and I need them fast. So I will set the bar a little lower and hope I can fly over it. I'm going to use the rig to pose the potato in three key static poses (one from each scene), and then texture and light the hell out of them. Worst case, I'll have three really good rendered images on my site before SIGGRAPH. Best case, I'll get that done in a week and go ahead and animate it as the last step. I'm not expecting that to happen though (at least not to my high standards) so I'm going to put the bulk of my remaining energy into texturing and lighting. And I'm going to try not to be mad about it.
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