Week 12

Week something or other, but academically, this is the last post before presentations next week! Now, this doesn't mean I'm going to stop working on this, I'm having too much fun with it for that. But for now, I have to present what I have so far and I'm confident that I have a pretty good set up going. Now, onto what happened so far.

 Now, here is what took up most of my time at the last minute before posting this. A bunch of "centipede1:"s in there. I had to go through my entire outliner and restore the proper naming conventions to everything. This took me (no joke here because I had no distractions and I was keeping track) 1.5 hours. Sweet cheeze wiz crust (I'm trying to stop saying Jesus Christ so I'm saying Cheeze wiz crust now). Anyways, I know that when you import a project, everything contained in that import get's their project name placed in front of it. The problem is, I never imported this project at any time except for the head last week when I was struggling to fix the antennae. The only thing that comes to mind is when using a different machine that also has maya, something occurs to cause this.


















I went back and looked at several videos of centipede rigs (not a lot of them are as intricate as mine) but the one video that has been my inspiration through this whole project gave me numerous ideas for this rig. That video is the only one I've seen where there are pole vectors for each leg, and so, I did just that.

I also went back and did a little regrouping of certain controls and re-parenting. One area was the rear legs. If you lift the back section, the legs should come up since these legs aren't really used for walking.

I also went and recreated the pincer controls since the antennae issue has finally been fixed (i had some more problems over the week but I solved it through proper parenting.

I even went in and included a flare (I can't remember if I made that already, but I did it anyways and perfected it.) I also put rotation limits on the pincers so that they wouldn't disappear under the head.





Voila! Everything rotates properly, no stretching, no errors, no controls going whacky, no nothing!

Next week's post is going to be a two part, one for my presentation on Monday and another on Friday as usual. Monday will basically be a summarize of everything that has been done so far, so no changes will be made, but if you want, give it a read!