Back to Dreg

For a long time after I finished the rig for Dreg, a nasty feeling was building up in bowels that I hadn't really finished the job. There were a few obvious, and few not so obvious reasons for this...

This bit contains lots of technical jargon, so those who haven't already might want to have a look at the terminology page...

He didn't have any teeth. Yeah. Sucks. Needed to do that, and no matter how simple the job of doing so may have been, for some reason my entire being rejected the idea of doing it. Why? Who knows. It was just finicky and annoying and... well, boring. But I knew it needed to be done (what was he going to grit during the tricky bits of the film?). So yeah, now he has some.

Also, his lips. Yeah. Didn't go into much detail there either. Especially as far as deforming them is concerned. I had made blend-shapes to handle his eyebrows and stuff, but trying to deform the mouth was very difficult because of the way I had modeled it. So yeah, I knew that was going to be a problem...

These reasons were actually more irritating, because I wasn't sure whether they were important enough to actually do the work (and it would be a lot of work) necessary to fix them.

I decided I wasn't too keen on blend-shapes. The idea of having to open a separate window to handle them annoyed me. Also, they didn't give me enough control on Dreg's features- Sure, I could change the blend objects (which took up a lot of space in the files), but even then the results weren't very satisfactory. Also, if I wanted more flexibility, I needed to make more blend shapes, so more sliders to go through, and less immediacy in animating Dreg's features.

After using influence objects to control the goon's features, which I originally did simply to save time, I realised I actually far preferred them. So I wanted to implement the same system on Dreg. This would mean quite a lot of work.

Another problem was the number of patches in Dreg's head. If you look at his “making of” page, he originally had a lot. Also, you'll notice that the patch around his mouth was very small, so too great a deformation would cause problems with the stitching and look terrible. I needed a much bigger patch around the mouth to avoid that. Now that would basically mean totally remodeling Dreg's head, almost from scratch. So that's what I did.

Yeah, that was annoying. And it took a lot of time, because I also needed to re-skin the head, including all those influence objects I had so delicately balanced to work on the old head. But the new head had far fewer patches, and a bigger one around the mouth, which made doing this easier. Also, fewer patches was good news because it meant less slow-down caused by the patch stitching...

Also, a small problem I had with the old head could be fixed. The ears were originally too far back, and looked really quite crap if the head were to look up... so now that's been sorted...

It also meant that I didn't need to worry about the blend-shapes I had initially set up. I could simply apply the influence objects to control Dreg's features just as I had done for the goon. This system also worked wonders for controlling Dreg's mouth, which would have been difficult to control by pulling vertices because of the complexity of the model at that point.

Was it worth it?

It was a lot of work, which took a lot of time, but not as much as the first time. I've learned quite a few skills, and was able to do the same job considerably quicker and better. And as to my fears about the work being unnecessary... well, I feel vindicated now, because he's a lot easier to animate facially, and also the few patches means he deforms better now, and can go into a few positions he couldn't go into before...

Anyway, look at him smile with satisfaction as he scratches his arm-pit. Being able to do that made it all worth while...

So, a happy ending?

Well... almost. Having such a large number of influence objects actually causes the file to take quite a long time to open as it calculates the position of Dreg's skin. It takes about twenty seconds for a file containing Dreg to open...

On the other hand, once I'm in, The computations seem to be really quit inexpensive (especially now that I've reduced the amount of stitching going on) and I get near-instant feedback as I deform him (though I can't quite play the animation in real time... unless I hide the head patches. Anyway, playblasting is pretty fast).