Friday 29 April 2016

Eleven Rig - How to Use It

One of the most popular rigs used by our students, often for entry into the monthly Eleven Second Club Competition is the Eleven Rig, available for free download at the Resources page of the club.

"Eleven" is a great, well-tested rig and perfect for getting a really nice character performances. It's good for lipsync, body poses, and facial expressions. It's also relatively easy to learn and reasonably logical in its setup.

Eleven does, however, have a few quirks. So, what are they and how can we solve them?

Eleven's eye looks weird - how can I fix it?
One of our students, Steve Woodhouse, has done a quick photoshop solution of a common problem with the eleven rig eye when imported into a scene.
1) select the eye geometry
2) select normals in the toolbar
3) Select 'reverse normals'.

What is the license for this rig?
Eleven is an open source rig, so you are "allowed to do everything you want with it, which includes any change to the rig, or its appearance, porting it to other software packs, and using it for commercial work".

However you must credit its creators, and they also ask that you don't use it for anything pornographic or offensive. Which is just good common sense, really.

How do you fix the "black eye problem" the rig has in Maya 2015?
Select the black eye and toggle "Lighting>Two-sided Lighting"

IK-FK switchers
Eleven's arms and hands are set to IK by default. If you want to switch to FK, find Eleven's Global_Scale control (the teardrop shaped control around her feet) and scroll down in the channel box until you find the switches, such as R Arm IKBlend. Set this from 0 to 1 and you are in FK mode.

Eye Controller Settings
The Eye Direction Control (named "Eye All Control") works best when you change the Aim slider (in the Channel Box) from Head to World. This way the eyes will still follow the Eye All Control even when you rotate the head - which is generally what you want.

Create a Face Camera
We recommend always creating a Face Camera when you animate characters in Maya. To do this, follow these steps. Creating a camera, name it faceCam, and parent it to the facial controls. Then tear it off (Panels/tear off) so you can return to the faceCam whenever you need it. This will save you a lot of time when animating facial expressions. To see this process in more detail, watch the video below:


Is there a video on how to use Eleven?
There is. To watch a video on how to use Eleven, see below:



Eleven Rig Running Slow?
If Eleven is running slow in Maya, select the Global Scale Control (the circle around Eleven's feet) and in the Channel Box make sure that Body Smooth is set to zero. This will give you a lower resolution mesh, and playback will be faster. When you do a final render, set Body Smooth to 1 for a better render quality.  To see more about how to make Maya run faster, read this blog post

More information
For more information on the Eleven Rig, check out the Eleven Rig Blog, which answers plenty of questions about this excellent rig.

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

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