3D Toolkit - Rigging, Posing and Skin Weights

Rigging and Posing

Following Simon's instructions, I finished the rig. I had a slight issue when using the point and orient options as the hand moved to a place it shouldn't have. I quickly realised it was because I hadn't ticked the maintain offset in the point constraint properties. Here's the finished rig.

I then tried to attach the rig to my character by resizing it to fit my character model and making sure the joints are in the correct place. I hadn't fully rigged the fingers as I wanted to see if everything else was working correctly. In the screenshot below, the hand joint must've not been in the centre which caused it behave a little strange.

I also encountered another issue. Whenever I skinned the model to my character to test if it worked, I couldn't move the controls at all. When I selected them to try and rotate them, the tool was greyed out. I eventually figured out that all my controls were locked. So I had to go manually unlock every one of them.

I then unskinned the model and started to make sure the rig was correctly placed inside the fingers.

When I had finished rigging my character, I binded it to the skin. I came across an issue where if I moved the arms too much, the cloak would move with it. To try and fix this, I unskinned and turned down the max influences.

Maya's Automatic Rig

Unfortunately, when I tried to reskin the model, my maya crashed and I had lost all the progress rigging the character. It was quite late and I panicked and didn't think I'd have enough time to manually re-rig my character. Due to this, I decided to test out Maya's quick rigging option. The guidelines had placed the elbows too low so I moved them to the correct placed and mirrored them. Then I got maya to create the joints and skin it to the character. I sculpted a different mask and posed him so he was holding it.

Skin Weights

I wasn't entirely sure or confident when it came to painting the skin weights. I followed the instructions that I had noted down from Simons demonstration on the painting method. Due to my lack of confidence, I only tried to paint the skin weights on the areas that showed the most deformation. In this case it was the elbows.

I locked all the layers so I didn't accidentally paint skin weights on another area. I tested out some of the options and accidentally made a big hole in the arm. I still don't fully understand what to do here so when I attempt this again in the future, I plan to get more support and do more research surrounding the methods.