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Hey all! We're back from Spring Break and slowly trying to get into the swing of things again.

What we week this did so to you know want? Okay.

After returning from break, Omar has been working on being able to correctly display beta-splines in Maya. It took him a while to get the MayaPluginWizard working, but in the meantime, he began research on how to define/draw curves in Maya without being restricted to the given interpolation scheme. Unfortunately, it has been very difficult to find exactly what he's looking for. The Maya C++ API documentation is not so great. Omar wants to be able to draw the beta-splines without having every point drawn be considered an edit (or interpolation) point. Basically, he is looking for the equivalent of a glVertex call for Maya. In that way, he can draw lines without defined, manipulable points. This week has been spent looking for answers and trying out different methods. He has been able to play around a bit with making simple maya plugins, which has helped. But the progress he wanted to make was not made.

In order to not continue wasting time, Omar will start trying to at least build a GUI in Maya (using MEL or C++--not sure which will prove to be more efficient) that will allow the user to take the beta-splines he is currently drawing (defined with roughly 20 times the number of edit points with which they should be defined) and manipulate the bias and tension (alpha1 and alpha2) parameters for the different segments of the curve, using simple sliders. He has started trying to learn how to do this.

Nicole has been working on the rig with fingers in Maya. She tried binding the different parts of the mesh separately to fix the 'mesh and skeleton not matching up' problem, but it didn't help. She had to reposition some of the joints before re-binding the skin, which led to a few problems...

Problem 1: Some joints no longer start in the same position. This means that Nicole could not just copy keyframes from the no-finger model to the finger model. She had to re-animate the already-animated gestures.

Problem 2: She had to paint skin weights, since joints were added. (She tried importing the previous weights, but it didn't help.) She couldn't get the weights 100% accurate on all joints; the wrist, elbow, and shoulder in particular look awkward when rotated at certain angles. This happened a bit with the previous rig and skin weights, but it is more noticeable with the new rig. If your wrist twists like this, you might want to see a doctor...

Problem 3: She belatedly realized that a few of the finger joints were not in the optimal places for certain gestures... specifically, any gestures that involved the thumb and fingers touching. She plans to re-visit this at a later time, if the opportunity arises, but figured that there were better uses of time than trying to tweak the rig again.

Nicole did manage to get the 10 animations (mostly) done. A few still need fine tuning. 
 



The rest of the rendered videos can be found here. Is there a way to organize Youtube uploads into "folders" or something similar, so the older and newer videos will be separate?

So, for next week:

• Omar will try to have a simple beta-spline manipulation GUI made in Maya (probably in MEL script)
• Nicole will start writing a Maya application (in Python?) to get the control points from an animation curve in Maya.

Until our Eulerian paths cross again.

Full of love we are,

Nelskati