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Season 01 – Episode 43, 44, 45 – Bindings and Deformation

Bindings, Deformation, and More!

Hi all,

Cataloguing three episodes at once is a first for me, but these episodes are also somewhat particular.

On 43 I set off to clean things up, test them, and save a scene that I could share. Little did I know I fell into old habits, and as I consider coarse deformation necessary for testing I started laying out a skeleton. It’s at that point that I realized I had never really discussed how I formalize/compartmentalize deformation, let alone the notion of Bindings.

If you watch 43 first, the first few minutes promise that it will be a chill-out stream, but I was wrong, and things escalate quickly into explaining division of responsibilities for deformation.
While episode 43 was a rabbit-hole, but still satisfying, I decided to do another episode giving the subject the introduction it deserves as well as introduce some of the necessary standards in our rig, that would be episode 44.
By the end of 44 I had done enough, I feel, to clarify what bindings are and how I rationalize deformation, but still had work to do and practices/standards I wanted to discuss; enter episode 45, where the skeleton is finished and the scene finally cleaned up.

The subject sneaked up on me, and I regret not having planned for it, but only because I blew the introductions. The material itself I believe to be important, and I think the episodes did come together in the end and I’m glad I got to the subject now and had three consecutive days to treat it.

I do make a recommendation in episode 44 that I will repeat here:
It might be best if you watch the first twenty or so minutes of Episode 44 first, and then watch episode 43 and on from there.
I don’t think the material is ruined or incomprehensible without that order, but the theory at the beginning of 44 makes 43 come together better.

Because this is a lot of hours of video I’m not going to break down the episodes specifically, there’s a lot in there from the Bindings/Deformation formalities to career advice to the audience.

So, with all that said, here’s the three episodes back to back.

Enjoy!

Season 1, Episode 43

Season 1, Episode 44

Season 1, Episode 45

Season 01 – Episode 42 – Finished Puppet

We Finished the Puppet!

And with this we have the answer to everything puppet, which pleases me a lot given this was episode number 42 🙂

Beside a small amount of chasing one’s own tail in the middle to add a feature that had already been added this was a very good stream for me.

Lots got done in the first hour
We added proper negative scaling consideration in the FK ankle. We re-inspected various elements and then mirrored the foot and finally cleaned up everything and relaxed the IK distance constraints a bit.

All of this gets us to a full, finished puppet and get the scene in state that can be finally shared with the audience again (I will edit this post then tweet as soon as I have that available).

There’s also a good 10 minutes of answer to a question asked on Twitter about live guides vs build scripts that might be worth it for some.

Enjoy!

Season 01 – Episode 40 – Learning and Visualizing Maths

Learning and Visualizing Maths

Over one and half hours focused on tools to visulize maths, developing intuition, and understanding correlations. Vectors, Matrices, Trigonometry and Desmos.

I know the math videos are popular, and I had wanted to do something along these lines for a while, and today it took my fancy to give it a shot.
If you care at all about learning maths then this is certainly worth watching, no matter what level you’re at (it’s more about learning than it is about the specific sub topics).

It also comes with some graphs for you to play with:
Rotational Transform
Angle Between

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 39 – Fitting the Leg

Investigating and Fitting Leg Component

This follows very closely from the previous episode.
We had one component left to take care of, the leg, which is also the most complex we have in the rig.

We sorted out the lot in this episode while re-explaining what the various sub-graphs do and making sure all expectations are met.

It’s a good episode to watch if you’ve been following reasonably close to releases and, like me, you need a refresher on what we were doing plus some tips on debugging/investigating while nodelling.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 38 – Fitting the Rig to Geometry, Re-acquisition

Fitting the Rig to Geometry

I announced this episode as a chill stream, but it accidentally came out quite well paced (at least in my opinion.) Always accidentally it’s the last day of the year and the episode ended up being a recap of everything we did during the year, which I also find fitting (no pun intended).

Initially I just wanted to reacquaint myself and the audience with the rig we’d been working on for so long, and I thought that fitting it to some geometry to put it to the test would have been a good way to go about it.
We did do that, in the end, but the outcome is an inspection and a summary of all components as well as a successful fit of the guides lining up everything to the geometry, and the first chunk of work on a scene to be shared done.

Leg Global, Godnode and Foot are all in good shape now, and next stream we should be able to do the leg, call it a wrap on the mehcanics (unless some bug or other rears its ugly head) and finally move on actually binding to the geo.

Whether you’ve been following all along and took a long break with me, or you’re bumping into this while binging on the whole season after it got done weeks or months away from me writing, I think it’s been a worthwhile episode.

Enjoy,