One of the later characters that required rigging proves to be the most complex as it is important to understand how rigging works in relation to the use of n-cloth and the overall pipeline between the two.
The initial struggle to overcome here is understanding how to combine the mesh. In order to have my previous rigs function without lag, I combined the non-animated parts of the model to create one mesh that can be easily manipulated during the skin weighting process.
Rig Scaling
Despite earlier mentions of the rig and scale-related issues, I still found that despite comparing the measurements between rigs early on, I still had some that were much larger than others. Recalling a technique I learned during the collaborative module, in which if the controllers and skeletal hierarchies and grouped together under a locator, the entire character rig can be scaled accordingly.
As displayed here in the video above, the rig scaling works successfully, and I will apply this to all of my models in the following week so they can be adjusted environmentally. While I understand this is not always the best industry practice, especially when there are more complex rigs being used, initially, there would be modelling guides with size parameters to follow instead. However, for a quick problem-solving solution for now and for this project, it should work fine.
This also led me to complete my final rig, which is a bonus character that will not speak or express any emotion, and the sole purpose of this character is to fill humour spaces and references and to act as a ‘random stranger’. Due to this, the rig only really needs to move up and down and move the eyes from side to side to indicate where he is looking. I did not want to rig the eyebrows and the mouth as I felt the expression was perfect as it was and completed the role I wished this character to fulfil.
As displayed in the video above, there was a slight skin weighting error in which some of the windows were being influenced by eye movement despite being flooded to the centre joint. After looking into this, I found that the upper windows were not properly skin binded to the skeleton, and after selecting everything and binding it with the skeleton again afterwards, the results worked just as expected.
Door rigging
In my earlier rigs, aspects such as the doors were not rigged correctly, therefore leading to an issue regarding the facial animation. Learning from prior rigs completed after this, I followed the same process of using a NURBS curve and changing the pivot translation to replicate that of the door hinges. However, despite this working for two of the rigs, I was having translational issues in which when I moved the hip controller, the door would move separately from the character mesh and in the opposite direction. To rectify this, like with the rigging for the eyes, I created a skeletal join that the door could be influenced too so that after parental constraints, it remained part of the character mesh uniformly.
Next Week’s Goals:
- Begin Animation
- Additional Environmental Modelling