Character and Narrative: Character Rigging

When I came to open up my most recent Maya project, I found (to my own frustration) that my skeleton scene hadn't saved at all. Anywhere. So before moving on I had to re-do the skeleton of my model. Although I'm annoyed that it didn't save, it has made me think about where I'm saving my work and I have backed up everything I have to date to avoid this situation again and I'm grateful it was only a small, simple part of the process that I lost.

Moving on...

The next part of the rigging process was pretty straight forward and I had no problems with it whatsoever, in fact it was a nice change from some of the more complex stuff that we've been doing recently. It was smooth sailing all the way up to until I had to orient the controllers, in particular the hand controller. I was really struggling with getting the hand controller to orient to the local transformers of the joint. This was because I was trying to orient the null group to the hand controller first, instead of orienting it to the joint. It was a simple mistake that was difficult to spot at first, so I struggled with this for a while, but I learnt my lesson and didn't make the same mistake again and was able to orient the rest of the controllers with no problem.

Shaping and Placing Controls

IK Handles

Orienting Joints

The next few stages went quite well, I didn't run into any problems and I picked up what I was supposed to be doing fairly quickly, as the tasks were quite repetitive and it wasn't until I reached the weight painting that I found the task a little confusing, as parts of the model were becoming influenced by other parts after I had altered them. However, this was due to the program wanting all parts of the model to be influenced and once I had made sure that each part of the mesh was influenced by a joint, I no longer encountered this problem.

Connecting Controllers

Binding

SDK

Reverse Foot Setup

Reverse Foot Setup

I did struggle with the reverse foot set up, however I was also very tired and I became impatient and made many little mistakes that were my own fault. I was also having technical difficulties at the time and kept forgetting to save. Other than making silly little mistakes I feel I did relatively well for my first time making a 3D model, even if I have garbage values in a lot of my controllers (oops). 

Garbage Values

On top of this, everything works fine except the eyebrows don't scale like the rest of the body, and I haven't been able to fix it no matter what I do, nor do I have time to go back and seek Mat's help. I could've taken a lot more care and time on this model if I had wanted to, however I was becoming frustrated with the whole process of rigging the character and so I struggled to stay motivated and to pay attention to what I was supposed to do.