I decided to add the armature and try posing my model first so that I could identify any possible issues that might need me to add things such as extra edge loops. This is because i didn’t want to run into an issue after texturing which would cause me to have to possibly alter my uv map and thus re-texture my model. I was very glad that I chose to work in this way despite it maybe not being the standard workflow as it allowed me to catch some errors early on.
The actually creation of the armature was very straightforward as we had already created an armature for a humanoid body in class. After making sure my model was properly aligned in the middle of the x-axis, I created the armature for half of the body. Along with the basic humanoid armature, I also added some parts which are unique to my character. I added bones to the wings as I wanted my character to be flying in his final pose. I also rigged his nose, however I never actually used this in my final pose. I then symmetrised the armature to mirror it to the other side.
After parenting all the parts of my model to the armature, I noticed an error when I began to pose the torso. As I had a solidify modifier applied to the shirt in my model, when I posed the body mesh below it, the inside of the normals applied by the solidify modifier clipped through the top of the shirt.
I figured that this must have been because I applied the modifier early on and then had been sculpting the rest of the shirt afterwards. To fix this I simply selected all the faces that the solidify modifier had created, deleted them, and added the solidify modifier back on. While this did fix the issue, I later found out that there was a way to copy the object data for the weights applied to the body mesh onto the mesh for the shirt, which may have been able to solve the issue more efficiently than my method.
In actually posing my character, I based my pose on this sketch I had drawn during my character design stage.
Most of the posing was very straightforward, however I did struggle slightly to pose the hands and fingers due to their complexity compared to the rest of the armature. I also ran into some issues with parts of the mesh clipping through other parts, however once I applied my armature I was able to fix this with the grab tool in sculpt mode.
Here is my final pose:
