Character 2 Rigging
Character 2 poses to have the most interesting facial rig due to the wooden beam that functions as an eyebrow, however I feel the prior weeks rigging techniques will also work well here. The initial step was adding all the skeletal joints, and being particrualy in the eyebrow placement joints as they will make to be inline so that one is not further forward or back causing mesh collisions.
After this process I once again binded the skin using closest distance in the joint heirachry and got similar results in the skin paint distribution to the first two times I have rigged the characters.
After flooding all the correct mesh to the correct corresponding joints, I was able to achieve the result I wanted that went quite smoothly in process due to last weeks experience.
While these legs were shorter than that of character ones, they are also a lot wider which gave me a lot of leeway into the skin weight distribution and therefore I was able to get much cleaner knee bend on both legs.
The interesting part proved to be the weight painting of the upper ‘beam’ or eyebrow as there needed to be a well blended by even distribution influence on each joint that has a careful gradiaent In the centre so that it will all move uniformly but allow for additional eyebrow expression.
This i feel was particularly successful, and shall we very interesting to utilising during the animation process later on in the pipeline.
and early issue I had was that due to the fact the eyebrows were not 100% Flooded to their corresponding joints, I has some initial issues with the influence on the eye joint due to the proximity during the binding process.
Character 5 Rigging
Once again, reaptitng the same process for all the rigs prior to this one, I was able to successfully skin weight paint the model in the same process and also have even more leeway with the leg Iks due to the slight length of them.
The method of using separate joints for the eyes has been particularly successful, so I have once again uiltised this effect. SInce they eyes are more similar to that of Character 2, I also found this to be quite simply as they only really need to move on a Y Axis.
During the initial Skin bind, there were deformatives in the bottom fo the mesh, due to the high number of stones and mesh collision in that area. This was quite a simple fix by adding the influence, to the central hip joint.
When rigging the door, I thought of technicalities surrounding the pivot point, and alinged the nurbs controller with this pivot point so once it was parented it would follow the same rotational axis and work in the same way. This controller would then be added heriarchally to the hip joint so that it will follow the rest of the rig without moving separately from the rest of the mesh.
Character 6 Rigging
I followed exactly the same process with the rig for character 6, however, instead of rigging one door, I rigged two. The legs on this one proved to be a lot more difficult to weight paint, but applying the same time and concepts to the rig I was able to create an effect that works for exactly what I need it to do going forward.
Next Weeks Goals:
- Complete all character rigging
- Start Environment Modelling