AGI Studio 1 - Folio Plan Post 2

Intention:

For Folio 2, I will be examining blend shapes and how they work in Unity and Unreal. I want to expand on what I did during the Folio 1 period and start playing with other things that will help me reach the goal that I have for my studio project. My studio project plans haven’t changed, I would like to develop a tool in Maya, that helps the modelers, animators, and riggers develop simple to complex rigs and have an option for them to be able to export the rigs and animations into a game engine.

Field:

My work for Folio 2 mainly sits within the field of character rigging and tools development in Maya.

Some of the practitioners that I was looking at for my research and reference are Josh Sobel and Sergi Caballer. Josh Sobel is a Character TD who is currently working at DreamWorks Animation and has been working as a rigger since 2013. He has a lot of character and creature rigs on his website that is used by a lot of students in their project reel and portfolio. The other practitioner that I was looking at is Sergi Caballer, who is a character modeler, rigger, and technical director. He is currently working as a 3D Character Modeling Supervisor at Walt Disney Animation Studio and has been practicing for more than 15 years now.

Conceptual, Technical, Craft and Management

The tool that I am working on for the Studio project has a facial rigging part to it and through the Folio 2 experiment, I want to see if I can make the blendshape in Maya and Unity communicate properly. If I am successful, I can add some blendshapes to the face rig that I will be building as part of the tool, which in turn will create better facial expressions in a game.

If this test becomes successful, I’ll also be adding in corrective blendshapes to the rigs that I create, which will in-turn prevent good deformations in the rig and will prevent meshes from going into each other.

Tools

I will be working back and forth with Unity and Maya for this part of the project. I’ll be trying out Python scripts in Maya and C# scripting in Unity to try and get the result I want.

I’ll first start with building a quick and simple facial rig in Maya with blendshapes. I’ll use this rig as a base to try out all my scripts in both Maya and Unity. I’ll export the rigs with blendshapes to Unity and try and make it work inside Unity with the animations.