Mercedes SLR Finished Rig

So Hand In Week is here, Had a couple close calls with the suspension and my hierarchy causing my rig to blow up and fly away, but it was just a matter of going in to the out liner, and through trial and error figuring out which controls needed to be higher/lower in the hierarchy to stop two different controls counteracting each other causing it to fly away indefinitely.

All in all I was very happy with my finished Rig, I got SDK's working for my headlights, doors, Bonnet and Boot and also steering, All of my controls are fully functioning and are appropriately locked and limited to where they needed to be. I believe that you would be able to use this Rig to create an animation easily and without it breaking.

So below is a few images from my finished Rig, displaying my rig and its controls.

Below Is a couple of images of My Rig's Controllers in use effecting the car.

Mercedes SLR Suspension, Lights and SDK's - 3D Rig Week 8

So this week was crunch time, I was pretty happy with how my rig was coming along everything was working well, and I just needed to perfect and assign the suspension to the controllers that I had made for it. I Also wanted to add a few key SDK's to my main controller for ease of use and add Headlights to that also.
I started by adding the wheel suspension.

In This GIF Im displaying that the wheels move up and down through there pre-set limits, 

They can also all be individually controlled for more customisation.

Mercedes SLR Doors, Bonnet & Boot - 3D Rig Week 7

Mercedes SLR Wheel Steering & Turning - 3D Rig Week 5

This week my focus was on nailing down all four wheels turning and, getting the front two wheels to turn in synchronicity.

I began by getting all four wheels to spin in place, I Had noticed that when everybody else was rigging there wheels, they had rigged the Brake disk and the calliper to turn with the wheel also, This is a huge error in function and it looks disgusting and lazy, I made sure that I moved the actual moving parts of the wheels into separate groups so that The wheel could spin freely as intended and not drag the brake disk and calliper with it, this is displayed below. 

The challenge moving forward would be that, when setting up the wheels steering to make sure the brake disk and callipers do move with the wheel to face the correct orientation and not clip through the wheel, I knew from some earlier trial and error that this again would just be an appropriate group hierarchy problem, This was the case and with careful grouping I achieved it.
Displayed in the GIF below.

Getting Started Mercedes SLR Model Fix Up - 3D Rig Week 3

This week we all got our hands on the gem that was the Mercedes SLR model from Turbo Squid :D
A finely Optimized and error free model as you can imagine!? (sarcasm)
First port of call was to fix the cars geometry and begin to fix any and all errors in the scene.





















As you can see the car did in fact contain many errors, missing geometry, Nurbs everywhere, inverted face normals, terrible outliner, one of our tasks was to clean up the entire scene and Rig so that its is neat and presentable for others to use.
 With the passion for fixing the car kicking in, I Started renaming all of the Existing geometry throughout the outliner learning what parts of the model were nurbs, and Polys. I then converted all of the nurbs into polys and built any missing geometry from the car back into it, Including inside of the engine and putting a floor into the car. Below is my car niceley fixed up, also includes images of before and after Texturing. The Texturing I based off of reference images i found online of common SLR colour schemes, I adapted it as I saw fit on my rig.

Introduction - 3D Rig Week 2

Week 2 was the beginning of 3D rigging, we received our first lecture on rigging and was shown around some basic maya rigging techniques, we played about with simple geometry cylinders rigging them to a block and playing about with the new tools.