Rigging by Faith (Which Sure Beats Doing it by Plain, Dumb Luck)

It’s been a while since my last post—that’s because I’ve been rigging this whole time, and if you notice in my last post, I had been rigging then too. Rigging is the process of making your character model ready to animate. You have to add in all the moving parts and make sure that the right parts of the model move with the right parts of the little digital skeleton you make.

I started the rigging in my Senior I class, in the spring. I then had to keep working on it at home all summer long. I ran into several weird problems along the way. On one occasion, I had finished the part of the rigging process I like the least, and then I noticed a problem with the file. This particular version of the rig would fatally crash Maya unless I loaded a previous version first. Well, that’s just weird. I chose to set the rigging aside and work on texturing, which is what my last post is all about. Finally I started working on the rig again, choosing to go back to the previous version and losing all the work on that part I so dreaded. Since then, problems have arisen almost constantly. I can’t even recall how many problems I’ve had, or how many times I didn’t think I could get past this stage of making the film. Here it is; this is where faith comes in to save the day. I began seriously praying before and during times when I would work on the rig. When I ran into problems, like I did the other night with another rigging issue, I had no choice but to go to the LORD. I finally said, “Well, LORD, this is Your project; You take care of this problem in Your time and in Your way.” That worked. One week ago, I finally finished rigging (with the exception of a small handful of issues that came up, like the one the other night). Naturally, guess who got the glory for getting me here? This picture you see here is the one I made as I finished the rigging, and I think that pretty much explains it.

Did I mention that God has blessed a lot during the rigging? Even with all of the issues that set me back? Well, let me point out a few cool little features on the rig. I put together a little rigging demo/thing for the body. Understand that Nebuchadnezzar’s robe will be animated later using cloth FX, which is why I turned off that layer. That’s also the reason why I’m not terribly concerned about the bunching/pinching at some of the joints—maybe I should be, I don’t know.

Well, from that you can see that he moves okay, that he has an independently rotating hip, and that his signet ring moves with his ring finger, but the really cool stuff is in the facial rigging. He can’t make any vocal/phonetic mouth shapes, and his lower lip is stuck to his jawbone, but he can still be expressive—and his mustache moves with his mouth, too. The tongue moves independently, the beard and “mullet” have controls for secondary motion, and the unibrow has controls for its various key spots. My favorite spot, though, is the eyes I can move them all around, move them independently, and control the upper and lower eyelid for each eye. Finally, my all time favorite control is the ability to dilate and constrict his pupils, which I believe will add volumes to the animation.

After the rigging was finished, I moved on to rework the animatic a bit. I intended just to add a bit of what I called “animatic blocking,” posing the character just enough to help the animatic make sense. As I worked my way through the film, I got more and more carried away. Finally, I got to the last shot in the dream sequence. At this point, the stone that struck the statue has been growing into this mountain that would encompass the whole earth, and Nebuchadnezzar is losing his footing on the shifting ground.

In this shot, Nebuchadnezzar starts falling, and the camera follows him as he falls, until he snaps awake in his bed. I really didn’t have much of an idea what I was going to do here, until it just happened like that. Thinking about it a day or two later, I realized that Nebuchadnezzar was physically falling at about the point in the vision where he would be falling in a slightly different sense. That type of symbolism is really my kind of thing—except I didn’t plan it to work out like that. So, again, this tells me that God is still an active participant in this project. Finally, at this point, I can actually see it coming together and working as a film, which excites me to no end. The fact remains that I still have no idea what God’s plan is for this film, but I don’t have to—I just know the God who has a plan for it, and that’s enough.