Character creator (of sorts) [WIP]

[funksmaname]

Hey!
I thought I'd see if it's possible to create a sort of character creator for a job I'm doing.
I will try to update this with problems I come across (at which point I might need your help!) but so far so good, it hasn't been difficult so far!

Here's what I have... I just made a simple wave which repeats as the weight bone is tweaked, and the style colours are changed.



The shirt clothing options are switches, as are the matching sleeve setups.

The character weight, from thin to fat, is controlled by a smart bone. The changes have to be reflected in all child switches, but once done it's quite a cool effect, and you can create several character body types with some minimal work.



I will be trying to add a bone to control height and see how that effects things.


Note: I have to give props to Mike Kelley over at http://www.animatorsforum.com/ - much of what I'm trying to do here is a feature poor recreation of his amazing 'No Limits Designer' script. Thanks Mike!

------ UPDATE 1 - A COOL DISCOVERY: Synced switches

Similarly to the way synced fbf frames work (See chucky's tutorials for more on that) you can sync any switch layer to a reference! What this means is, if you have different elements in different layers that need to match eachother whenever the master is switched you can create a reference of the switch layer, but delete/empty/change it's content. While the contents of the individual layers are different, when you switch the master the copy will follow...

For example, I have different shaped noses, and each nose shape creates a different shadow on the underlying face (the shadow should be masked by the face shape, but the nose shouldn't) - I made a reference of the nose layer and put it into the face group, and under each matching nose I made a vector for its shadow. Switching noses now automatically switches shading.

I use a similar thing for the clothing (shirt/Tee on body vs sleeve options) or anything else that needs accessories in different place on the layer structure (Hair pieces in front and behind the head that go together)

[lwaxana]

Cool experiment! I'm interested to see how it works out when you're using it in your project. Seems like it would be extra handy for crowd/dance/parade/military drill scene where everyone is doing the same thing.

[ulrik]

This looks really interesting, please continue to post your progress with this!

[funksmaname]

Here's an update.
I created some control bones - these two variations are using only 2 different noses, 2 sets of ears, different weight and positions and only 1 hair and only 1 mouth. Once I have some more options, different face shapes, eye shapes, I think they could look quite different.

note: these characters are for a client with some existing characters, so I'm trying to emulate their existing style (not strictly my design)