Sunday 4 September 2016

Meet Mery! - How to Use the Mery Rig for Maya

Meet Mery! We're recommending the free Mery character rig for Maya for use by our students at Animation Apprentice, ideal for character animation.

Mery is now live and available to download, and is completely free.

One of the many benefits of animating with Autodesk Maya is the large and growing global community of artists who collaborate on freeware projects, bringing to life excellent animation rigs.

Download Mery
To find The Mery Project, go to  http://www.meryproject.com

Mery Explainer Video
Below is a short video explaining how Mery works:


Mery Project Presentation from Mery Project on Vimeo.

Terms of Use
Mery was created by Jose Manuel García Alvarez and Antonio Méndez Lora. You can use Mery for animation practice and educational purposes, and in your demo reel, portfolio and on your website.  But, you cannot use the rig for commercial purposes, such as short films, movies or any content with financial gain. Also, you can't use Mery to create any pornographic, sexually explicit, violent, racist or otherwise immoral content. 

Always Credit Mery's Creators
You must give the appropriate credits for "meryproject.com" in your work, by putting the credits into the video or the description.

File size - Slow Playback
Mery's file size is very large - around 300mb - which makes her a little cumbersome. Part of that size seems to be caused by multiple wrap deformers for the many clothing options she has hidden away.  Make sure you do a proper tech check before you animate with Mery. Can you get real-time playback in your Maya Viewport? If not, you might want to pick a lighter, faster rig. For some tips on how to get faster playback in Maya, read this blog post

Mery's facial Controls
The face controls are located - slightly oddly - far to the left above the character. To animate her facial controls, create a new face camera and parent it to the facial controls. Then, tear off the camera so you have a separate window with the facial controls easily accessible. To do this, select your face camera and then go to panels/tear off to tear off the face controls as a separate camera view. There is also an Orthographic View which gives you access to Mery's facial controls. 

Create a Face Camera
To see how to create a face camera in Maya and parent it to the rig, watch this short video.



Facial expressions
Mery's eyes can be hard to get expressions from. She tends to have a slightly "wide eyed" look, where the eyelids move but her cheek area does not move very well. Make sure you can get the expressions you need out of Mery before you commit to animating a shot with her.

SetUp
Make sure Mery's eyes are focused on the Eye Direction Controller, and her eyes continue to look at the Eye Direction Controller when you move her head. To set the rig up correctly, select the Mery Eye Controller and change Head Follow to zero in the channel box (see image right).

Mery playback problems in newer versions of Maya
Anyone using the Mery rig that's having problems with random deformations even after keying (especially with her knees deciding to pop all over the place), in your scene, try going to Windows > Settings/Preferences > Preferences
Look for the "Settings" entry and find the "Animation" options under that - the top option there is "Evaluation Mode". If this is Parallel try switching it to DG.
Short cut is to simply enter...
evaluationManager -mode "off"
...in the MEL line at the bottom of the screen.
*Hopefully* if you now scrub through you should see the poses you set to begin with.

Mery animation
To see some excellent animation done with Mery by Escapee Henry Fenwick, now working at Jellyfish Pictures, see the video below. The shot was created as part of the monthly 11 Second Club competition.



Also check out this excellent animation by one of our online MA students, Jinng Hwee Tan.



What other rigs do we recommend?
Of course, there are many other free rigs that are excellent and well-proven for character animation. Don't forget that their creators should always be credited.
  1. Bouncing Ball. The best place for beginners to start learning animation. You will have to register with Creative Crash first, but it's free and they don't send spam.
  2. Ultimate Rigs. A great collection of free rigs.
  3. Monty. Our favourite simple biped rig - perfect for learning animation. 
  4. Norman. An excellent biped rig, very stable and thoroughly tested. Norman can be adapted and customised.
  5. Heavy. Based on the character from the video game Team Fortress. An excellent, stable rig.
  6. Morpheus. An excellent free rig for character performance, and very adaptable. Not for beginners.
---Alex

To find out more about Animation Apprentice, click here for a link to Frequently Asked Questions. To sign up for our next classroom at Animation Apprentice, follow this link.

3 comments:

  1. I'm here a few years late but still, such an informative post. This was incredibly helpful, thank you so much!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Problem with mery hands and elbow rig..help

    ReplyDelete
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