Thursday 7 July 2016

BB-8 From Star Wars - Now Available for Maya Animators!

BB-8. Copyright Walt Disney
We're excited to see what our students will do with this new Star Wars BB-8 rig - just recently released at Creative Crash.

Like any fan art, the creator of this rig obviously doesn't own the copyright - that is owned by the Disney corporation, who now own the Star Wars franchise. But that doesn't mean we can't use BB8 to do some great animation - it just means we have to respect the owners and not do anything silly with it (like, say, try to make a profit from it).

There are in fact two versions of this rig. The image to the left is an improved and updated version 3 (with extra lights and stuff) - which you can download here

Below are some tips on how to use the BB-8 rig:

Head and body animation
The head and body can be separated out and animated individually. To do this, use the  BREAKHEAD_CONTROL and BREAKBODY_CONTROL. These are useful for making BB-8's head detatch from the body.  You will have to unlock the attributes in channel box first.

Patterns on the body
Patterns on the body can be rotated in any direction with a non-keyable ORIENTATION_CONTROL.  This will not affect your animation. There is also an "Autodrive" feature that uses Expressions to make BB-8 roll automatically.

Locators
There is a locator which is used to manually animate BB-8's movement and location.

Hidden menus
The attributes for certain Nurbs curves are locked and hidden. To get those hidden attributes back, go to Window>General Editors>Channel Control
"HEAD_EXPRESSIONS" layer has an invisibile Nurbs curve (Visibility checked off). To make it visible right click on the layer"HEAD_EXPRESSIONS">Select Objects>Window>Attribute Editor>Object Display> and then check select Visibility. 

Head expressions
To adjust the expressions for HEAD_EXPRESSIONS: right click on the layer>Select Objects> Click and highlight attribute you want to adjust>Edit>Expressions> (here you can change "headrotate.rotateX=headcontrol.translateZ*30” to any number etc.)

Video walk through
To see a walk-through of the BB-8 rig (recommended), watch the video below


BB-8 V3.0.0 Rig Animation Sample 2 from Anh Nguyen on Vimeo.


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