No Country for Old Men Sprint #10

 For this sprint I worked on just the money case rig.   The money case rig is built to be simple and rigid.  It is fully FK functionality. 

Completed Money Case Rig

To start I simply placed my joints in the geometry in the areas that need to bend and move. 

Money Case Joint Placement

I also organized my hierarchy with a naming convention.  

Hierarchy Naming Convention

From here I used my controller generator tool and created some controllers for my rig.  I also colored and shaped the controllers around my geometry.  I also added constraints from my controllers to the joints for simple functionality. 

Using Controller Generator Tool to Create Controllers

Then I worked with skinning.  I added a geodesic voxel bind method and began to see how the rig moves and what needed to be adjusted.  After skinning I ultimately added some more joints and a few more controllers to get the movement I was looking for.  

Skinning the Money Case 

Once I skinned the geometry to the joints I went through each controller and locked and hid the transforms and scale.  

Money Case Lock and Hide

After cleaning the money case rig I exported and brought it into UE4.  I ran into an unexpected problem after bringing this asset into UE4.  Some joints were added and the root joint was taken out of the rig. 

Unexpected Broken Money Case Rig in UE4

To troubleshoot the problem I went back into Maya to search for the problem.  After opening Maya to my money case file it crashed and corrupted my rigging scene.  I did get my scene to open but I found a broken rig with all of the controllers locked.   To get the controllers to work I had to unlock all controllers.  

GIf of Broken Money Case Rig

I decided it was best to start with a clean file so I went back into a previous save I had worked on and went through and began to check for what could have caused the error in unreal engine.  I checked the geometry and cleaned it out of any values it had in the transforms and scale.   I found that a few of the pieces still had values and history.  I then checked each joint and re-skinned the geometry. 

Completed Money Case Rig