Cubies: Week Two

* As mentioned earlier, I started working on this project 3 weeks ago. But since I've been working at half capacity I will call it two weeks...

This last week I made some progress with my rig, as well as some unfortunate going-backwards episodes, due to various problems I found with the existing rig. The focus of the week was thinking about the story and how to make it possible.

• First thing I needed is to retract the hands of the cubies. This was done using a blend shape which is controlled by the main control of the character (ctlBody). That was not an easy task to make it look good, so it took most of the week, after testing different methods.


• After retracting the arms, the model looks something like that:
  
  


• From the model with no arms, I started thinking about the jiggle and deformations of the cubies before their arms grow. For that I created a lattice which is also controlled by ctlBody (you can see the lattice in the image above. note that the lattice only affects the body, while the hands are outside the lattice).


• Finally I declared my rigging "done", and started working on the composition and story board. The first frame of the first scene will look like this (materials and lighting are not yet done):
  
  



• Unfortunately, I found out some more problems with the rig the last couple of days so now I have to repeat some of the work. This concludes this week in a pessimistic tone...