Mechanical Rigging

This is a mechanical rigging that I created for my team project at Advanced Game Art Production Course. We'll create animations for this spider robot to grab a pen, write on screens, and crawl everywhere in the room. From the animation requirements, I designed and created rigs and controls for it.

To make its legs more powerful and flexible, I looked into various tutorials and resources on implementing IK FK snapping functions. I learned and concluded the following two ways of solving this problem:

1. Let the FK controls match the transformations of the IK joints, which enables FK to follow IK; And for IK to follow FK, match all transformations of IK control to the corresponding FK joint; and for pole vector control, set one locater that is the child of the FK joint, then match the pole vector control to that locator. All the steps could either be done manually or using scripts. The prerequisite is to use separate IK, FK, resultant joint systems for IK/ FK blending.

2. Another way of solving this problem is using the node editor to use the conditional node and multiply and divide node to make a conditional switch between the IK and FK states, and also creating a matching group and an offset group of each FK / IK control in the outline structure, which will transfer the transformations of the joints between these two states.

Both methods worked, and I enjoyed learning scripts and nodes editor in Maya to create more powerful functions!

Also for the next steps, I'll implement more and diverse types of robots for our scene. I'll also try to create animations for them. I'll post future development then! Really looking forward to this!

- Character rigging by Tianheng Sun
- Character desgin by Rain Du
- Character modeling by Ariana Gong