Final Project - Character Setup

A little test pose of the moment when the scout appears to have hit his ball over the wall

So despite not having a complete idea i still decided to go ahead and start setting up everything i would need to make my final animation.

First things first i wanted to create my second scout and immediately i had a realisation: i needed to mirror my scout model for the mirrored universe! Unfortunately this task was not as easy as it sounded, the model has been created in such a way that all the geometry is unselectable, cannot be manipulated without unlocking various attributes, and is also hidden within the Outliner (A window in Maya that lists all the elements in a scene) so even using that to select the model is very difficult.

Above you can see the slight problem i had, mirroring the geometry was easy enough, as you can see i decided to only mirror the parts that needed mirroring. However, as i understand it, i will be unable to remove the extra geometry without having to re-rig the model, and this is a very complex, well rigged model that i would rather not mess with.

However, not wanting to give up on the idea i proceeded to try a couple more ideas before giving up completely. The first idea involved the manipulation of the texture maps given that i couldn't mess with the model itself, it involved taking the UV mapping for the original objects and moving it all into an alpha space on the UV map. This would make those models invisible. As it turned out even the UV maps couldn't be manipulated so i had to drop that idea.

Next i had the idea of duplicating the objects before mirroring them, in the hope that this would grant me full manipulation of them again, allowing me to delete the extra geometry. Having done this i would proceed simply to parent the object to the original, unmirrored mesh, which would then have its visibility attribute switched off. Duplicating the objects did not grant me manipulation or easy selection of the object, and i also noted that when parented the child was not moved as the parent was; i believe this is due to the models 'control-centric' setup.

Having tried these ideas i felt close to giving up, however, whilst poring through the menus for something that might help, i stumbled across something called 'Separate' under 'Mesh'. Feeling utterly unoptimistic i clicked it whilst i had the bags geometry selected, and was blown away.

This function was EXACTLY what i was looking for, it had taken the bag geometry and turned it into a group containing both the original and the mirrored model's as SEPARATE MESHES!! This meant i could simply delete the original meshes whilst still keeping the mirrored object as part of the initial rig.

Sadly, i got my hopes up too soon... i encountered another major problem: The mirrored meshes had reversed axis or movement AND rotation meaning that if i moved the rest of the model in one direction, the mirrored meshes would move in the opposite.

At this point i decided i had had enough, i was spending far too much time on this problem without finding a solution. So in the end all i had was compromise, and i believe i found a good one as it meant i had more to animate as well(a plus given my concerns about the run-time for the finished animation).

My compromise would be to remove the objects that needed to be mirrored from the model, but rather than simply not including them in the first place, i would instead start my animation and show the Scout taking off these various items, meaning at the point he comes face to face with the other scout their is nothing that needs to be mirrored.

Admittedly this dictates the only obvious way to show the mirrored world, which will have to be through the movement of the character. However, i am still excited for the final product.