Well, here it is, first blog, which I hope will help me dedicate myself more towards following through with the things I so often start but never finish.
Most of the things that I will put in this blog will be my poor attempts at learning to draw, some of my researches in rigging and animtaion, rants, thoughts on pretty much whatever. I guess I just want a place where I can put stuff I don't mind others seeing, and hopefully giving more resource for some things for others. Hence the name of the blog: "Brain Glitches and Finger Twitches" :)
Just to Give a small head start, I wanted to show some of the things I did while looking for ways to fix some really annoying issues in common rigs. After I made a rig at work, I was playing around with it, and as the legs the creature had were quadroped, I have rigged them with a standard double IK set-up. Nothing overly fancy, but when I was trying to play around with animating the set-up, the first thing truly hit me as a blocker was the snapping of the IK. Which lead me to looking around and learning that the answer was Soft IK. Basically what I want to show is a small test with not just soft IK (Giant thanks to Brad Noble for telling how he did it in his SkeletonRig) but also with some ideas for it being stretchy and fully bendy. At them moment the only video I have is in WMV format, so bear with me.
But all this lead to me learning a bit more about IK, and as I feel that every day I wake up, I seem to learn something, today was me learning about what kidn of IK is iin general used in DCCs. Most of my time I thought that the general IK's used for instance in Max (The main package I use) were all analytical IK's. Yet today I realised, after reading up on learning how to do CCD (Cyclic Coordinate Descent) IK, I realised that Max's HIIKSolver was just that, a CCD IK! In fact, that instantly explained to me why so often I saw tiny jitters when setting up those chains in rigs. In the docs you can find that the only analytical solver that Max provides is an IKLimbSolver, which basically works for a 2 bone chain only, as if you try to make it work for more bones, the calculations basically increase quite a bit, and so it is not allowed in the app.
