Modelling & Rigging: Rigging

Carry on extruding the neck upwards

start shaping out the head, use the insert edge loop tool to add more detail

Extrude out the edges from the hand too.

look from the top view to make the arms narrower.

fill the hole at the end of the hand

delete one of the half of the model

now mirror it make sure you select merge with the original.

Sometimes when you mirror it some mirror something the line in the middle can have some errors so just spend sometimes making all the triangles into squares.

before you start rigging it is important to Delete the history and Freeze the transformations of uour mesh.

this takes away any unnecessary data connected to it and make animation much faster as your computer doesn't have to process the history when rendering out.

Now you have finished modelling and you are happy with everything, you can start Rigging your model.

start off by making simple bones , the first bone you make is your Root joint, and it is normally placed in the middle of the chest, as this place is fairly static.

press enter when you are finished.

Select the create joint tool again, and left click on the root joint, this lets you create another set of joints that come out from the root joint, create the pelvis, hip, knees, ankles and toes for the leg, and the neck and head joints for the head.

now select the shoulder and use the Mirror Joint tool, this will make a duplicate of the arm on the other side of the mesh

Now you are ready to Bind the mesh to the skeleton.

select the skeleton then the mesh and go to bind skin-smooth bind.

at this point it is really helpfull to name all your joint, as when it comes to painting weights it can be very confusing if the joints are not labelled properly.

By rotating the joints you can see if there are any wierd influences on the mesh. the most common example is the part under the arm, when you rotate the arm up, sometimes this part moves up with the arm aswell.

To edit this out you have to go to Skin-Edit smooth bind-paint skin weights. or you can click the paintbrush when in animation mode.

Painting weights can be very confusing, as at first it doesn't make much sense, and when you think u've got it figured out some things still don't happen the way you want them to.

the main thing to know about Painting weights is that each vertice is affected by the joints. and the total it can be influenced is by value of 1. so you cannot have 2 joints with 1 influence, but you can have 2 with 0.5 influence.

Another thing that confuses people is that a vertice sometimes spikes out, and even though you take away all influences on it, it still doesnt stay with the rest of the mesh, this is because if it has no influence at all, then it will stay at the origin, so its always good to have them influenced by something even if you are not going to move it, a bit like the chest beign influenced by the root joint.

Brush selection.

here you can select the joints you are painting. below the value of influence you are painting onto the mesh, with 1 being maximum and 0 beign none.

go through the bones and paint a weight of 1 on the main areas you want it to affect, with things like the shoulder you might want to leave a bit of influence on the top, towards the neck, as this simulates the muscles bunching a bit.

rotate the joints to its limit to see if there are any wierd deformations.

the reason this happened is because the skin had value of 0, so it just tried to stay in the origin,

after painting it it gets better, but it is still a bit wierd.

try looking at the bones above in the Hierachy chart.

so you can see that the pelvis joint has influence on the top of the leg, and this is what was making it go wierd.

ITS OK!

in this instance it is the opposite, the ankle is having too much influence on the shin, so take it down to 0, and then select the knee, and drive influence up to 1.

do the same with the neck, you should notice that i put 3 joints for the head, later though i founf out that the top one is a bit unnecesary, and you can just delete it, and controll the head movement with the one in the throat.( but you still have to paint weights on the one at the base of the neck!)

try bending and rotating your model into wierd angles, you never know all the movements and poses your client or whoever is going to use your model will use, so its best to try and make it as realistic as possible.

Here no matter how much I painted weights on the arm, i kept getting this funny crease.

after scrolling through the joints i realised it was the Root joint, which had a value of 1 in the shoulder area that was messing everything up!

now it looks much better.

again having problems in the shins, but it turns out a bone on THE OTHER leg had influence, i must of accidentally painted it, once you think youve done everything, check and recheck all your joints to make sure you dont have any out of place weights.