Technical Difficulties in Other Groups

There are also a few technical difficulties of other groups that I helped to solve during the project:

Optimization for Ogre Rig

Problem: Due to use of Set Driven Keys in the Controllers of Facial Blendshapes, the rig becomes too heavy to animate and it can't scroll through the frames smoothly.

Solution: Changing SDK to Expressions made the rig a lot faster, since Expressions are fastest to calculate.

Reconnecting Facial Blendshapes to a New Model for Dragon

Problem: Connecting Model with Blendshapes and Skinned Model

Solution: Prepare a new Mesh that is ready for Rigging and Blendshapes, connect the Blendshapes to the new mesh through a bridge Mesh and Copy the skin weights to the new mesh.

Problem: The skinned and blendshapes geometry has the wrong UV.

Solution: Use Transfer Attributes to transfer the UV from the model with correct UV.

SDK for Robotic Arm Transformation 

Problem: Linking up a Transformation Animation of multiple objects to an attribute of a single controller with an SDK. (How?)

Solution: Create a Set Driven Key from the new Attribute to an animated object and open the Node Editor. Connect the Attribute to the input of the animation graphs of the objects. The node editor will automatically create a unitConversion Node. This node will convert the Attribute value into Frame number of the animation.

The default conversion (250) will convert 1 attribute value into 1 frame of animation. Since the animation is 64 frames in total and the attribute's maximum value is 1, the conversion should be 250*64, which is 16000. And then 1 attribute value will count as 64 frames of animation.

The output of this Conversion Node is linked to the input of every single animation graphs of the animated objects in the Node Editor. Therefore when the attribute value changes, it affects all of the multiple objects' animation simultaneously.

This can still be optimized with Expressions, but the SDK works just fine.

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