The Knight Spider - A Tale of Character Acting, Lip sync, Rule Changes and Vaccine Viruses

This page actually doesn't contain links to other rigs and such as less work was happening in classes and more time was placed into working on the final submission.

Hello there! This page is dedicated to the final project I submitted to not only my university but also to The Rookies' 'The Knight Spider' contest! Unlike some of the other pages on this blog, there aren't gonna be too many links to rigs or plugins here (mostly because of the contest rules being the way they were).

Post Links:

Part 1 - The Plan
Part 2 - Rule Change
Part 3 - A Long Hiatus

So, let's start at the beginning.

The Plan

I knew I wanted to work on the final piece for this module pretty early on, mostly because it'd be good practice for actual in-industry scheduling - you're better off starting your work early than late. I know I can get a free pass because this is an educational environment, but there's no time like the present!

So, I got to work sketching out an idea for what I wanted to do with my character. For this module, we needed to enter our work into a competition (some suggestions do include The 11 Second Club and of course The Knight Spider), so I chose to work with The Knight Spider rig as provided to us via the contest site. This rig is really expressive (in my opinion) and really exudes character! 

Excuse the terrible image quality, my phone camera doesn't know how to focus in on pencil drawings...

Did I know what I wanted to do? No. No I didn't. I had a rig, and that was really it. So, I thought sketching out the character might help me think through what I want the character to do exactly. So, after getting familiar with the posing of the character and brainstorming different actions and such, I decided to really lean into the Knight role the character's supposed to play and create a short fighting action. Nothing too crazy, mostly because fight animation is something I have never done prior to this, but my idea was slowly coming together.

I was originally going to use Turbosquid assets, then I realised that I can actually just quickly model the props I needed - so I spent a short amount of time modelling a sword, a lil horned helmet (think your stereotypical Viking helmet) and a tailor's mannequin to use in my scene. I thought it'd be funny to take advantage of the character's confidence (as the concept art conveys through his pose) by making him audition for a part in a stage-play or movie, and that the Knight taking this audition to seriously is a kind of comedic element to the sequence (not that it was funny).

So, with props modelled and an idea in my head, I got a storyboard and some reference footage ready to go!

I know its a bit faint, but there is a storyboard in there somewhere...

So with all of this prep work done, I moved onto making a blockout of the scene. This was... honestly really difficult. I ended up missing a lot of breakdown poses in between the main ones, so of course that meant I splined to too early and had to add extra frames between each of my original poses. At least I'd learnt something from this.

But with the blockout complete, I decided it was time to start rigging up props. Then, the rules changed and I got frustrated.

Fighting Everything (Including Maya)

So, I began working on the blockout shortly after recording my reference footage. I definitely began just taking notes during class because I wanted to get this piece finished in time, and I also just wanted try planning out what parts of the animation need doing by what day. That part went well, the planning that is. 

But so much went wrong that I just have a List to read off at this point.

So, first thing first, I splined too early. Which was very upsetting at the time - I pretty much convinced myself that I was gonna miss the deadline even though I was about one or two weeks into 'production'. Honestly it was a good attempt at a first blocking pass even though it was, in practise, completely unusable. 

Yep, that was the initial blockout. Not good, at all. I did revisit it - the main issue was a lack of breakdown poses (which meant that I was letting Maya just do its thing, which really made this feel like a computer just animated the whole thing). After the next pass though, I did begin picking up steam again and began rapidly creating new passes - some with facial animation and then more with extra tweaks.

So, the floor lamp was eventually added.

You're probably wondering where the Maya battles were being fought. Honestly, its kind of long and unnecessary as a lot of this can be put down to hardware - but I had to fight this file not only at home (with my relatively potato computer) but also on campus. Why? That stupid freaking umbrella. 

It was about 11,000 polygons total. No smooth surface previews, honestly turning on smooth mesh added barely any polys (what like 5000 extra). I shared that with a friend of mine (who is studying game art at the same uni as me) and she was floored - I am fully convinced that this umbrella was either sculpted or 3D phot scanned into a program and then uploaded its so high poly. Heck, the file would turn Maya into a slideshow on my home PC (even if I gave Maya 99% of the memory my lil desktop has).

Then there was the chaos that was trying to rig these props. That mainly came down to me being inexperienced with Maya's rigging tools (I have more experience using Blender) but my god this was chaos. Certain parts would just flat out refuse to work, and then I had to scale the size of both the lamp and umbrella so that they're proportional to the Knight Spider. To add to this boiling pot of problems, I'd successfully constrained the umbrella to its hand the wrong way around. So, I had to move the umbrella to move the hand and forearm - I have made terrible decisions working on this.

But, I endured these problems and eventually produced a 'final' spline that I was happy to submit.

And then, something kinda scary and extremely frustrating happened to our class. I've been waiting to talk about this (mostly to flex on the thing for some unknown reason, I dunno I'm just proud of myself for actually getting it fixed).

The Maya Vaccine Virus

So, for those that don't know, the Maya Vaccine Virus is a Virus that specifically targets Maya 2015 to 2020 and takes advantage of the script node system Maya uses to create, import and reference scenes in a file (or to even use certain plugins). This virus is essentially a trojan that enters a user copy of Maya, hides itself in the userSetup.py file inside of the scripts folder and starts attaching itself to scene files by creating more script nodes that create the virus files and edits etc etc. It's a cycle.

So, this all started after we'd had a lighting demo done as part of a cover lesson for a couple of our classes' tutors. The demo went perfectly fine and had no issues really - overall very chill class. But then the error started popping up on other student's screens. One of my peers has already had this thing appearing since last module, but now our entire row was getting it. So, after I got my work in a state that was at the very least submit-able, I decided to plug the error code into google to see what happens.

Only then did anyone find out we had a virus on most of our onsite users.

At least for my class that was the case, but after emailing IT I got sent instructions on how to clean the Maya scene files and delete the virus from your license so it can't keep replicating. In the end, I spent an entire day just cleaning my files of this virus before eventually attempting a final render.

After all of this, along with a graphics card error that forced me to render the night before submission, eventually culminated into a piece of animation I'm actually pretty proud of. Honestly, if I were to do this specific shot again I would definitely take more time to analyze the arcs of the hands more closely than I had originally (and make sure I do the parent constraint correctly on the character's prop, I don't want to go through all of this again honestly). But, here's the final result!