Technical aspects & issues

There were many issues to be had over the project, and something I generally expected taking on an entire animation myself. I'll start off by saying the penultimate issue of this project is one I unfortunately I could not fix, as it would have required coding. At some point in the process something caused the scene files not to open on any other computer but my own which was very devastating to discover right before the rendering stages, some suggest it may have been an issue with Maya 2019, which only recently has released an update to address many of the issues. This left me with two options, to try out Google Zync or render entirely on my own system. I later found out that Zync also could not read them at all so I had to make a decision. I decided to make a compromise on the general render quality to be able to showcase the work, though being a 90s period insipried project, I guess a slightly lower image would be okay. However, its not what I would have liked ideally but as its not far from the finished result, I've aimed to strike a balance that wouldn't alter the viewers ability to see the animations of the cars and characters itself.

Throughout the project, I found the technical issues to be my biggest challenge especially regarding rigging as in previous years was an area I had less experience with doing. Just as much time was spent problem solving, researching and diagnosing as there was creating, though mainly a slower process as it was an on-going learning curve. Sometimes when results on specific problems could not be found I would have to use my own initiative to work out the problems and it felt rewarding. I made a list every time I had a new issue over the development to remind myself how to fix those problems. Some of the issues may have been covered already in other parts of the blog:

1. Scaling characters with the delta mush deformer - characters would deform when keyframed, a simple fix by Richard Thompson https://vimeo.com/161493228 - delete the delta mush deformer node and reapply it once the character was re scaled.

2. Tongue mesh transform/translate issues - The tongue group containing the tongue mesh had to be parented directly under the Control group, this way all

the tongue controllers including joints and ik handles rotate with the head correctly. Though with the tongue mesh within the Control constraints it would not rotate correctly as it should, placing this mesh by itself outside of its own group and the Head Control group then solved it. once this was done I could now rotate the head controller and everything worked perfectly. But once using the master controller to move the entire character around the tongue mesh would move outside of the head as well. I then worked out that the final solution was to disable the "Inherits Transform" under the tongue mesh attributes. This was one of the issues that I could only solve myself as it was more specific

3. Character rigging issues: setting up a rig for separate head mesh was something my characters required for the blendshapes though finding the best method took sometime with my small knowledge in rigging at the start of the project. I used advanced skeleton as another student suggested it was using it for a more complex rig but after trialling it out with early test characters felt it didn't work as well for mine so I used Tsm3 which I found to be more intuitive for having multiple characters. The default Tsm head controller was particularly useful as it allowed easy selection for the characters whilst in their cars. However by default the Tsm biped had a few extra controls for the head and neck which I didn't need, so I modified the setup to work as I needed it to:

4. Character mesh disappearing in Maya Viewport: This was an issue that only appeared after the animating was complete and I updated my environment to each scene file. I'm not entirely sure how the environment had an effect on my characters but eventually I discovered it was tied to the viewport itself. This issue fortunately would not have effected the animation though I found a solution to it anyway. The way I fixed this issue was simply by deleting all by type > static channels

As you can see, the left shows that mesh would render out fine and the right viewport has missing mesh