Files:
Before this year I had not rigged since the vertical slice project in 2023. I was a little nervous about rigging again as it was not something that came naturally to me the last time, but I knew I wanted to give it another try.
Alec recommended using the Advanced Skeleton which sped up the rigging process a bit. Ideally, I wanted to give myself enough time to rig in case of technical issues, such as skin weights needing repainted etc, which needed done to the fingers, legs and face at various points during semester 2.
Since I used the Advanced Skeleton, all I had to do was select the biped rig which generated half of a skeleton that I had to manually align with Charli’s proportions. After the controls were set, I created a cage to Charli’s proportions so her initial skin weights would be as accurate as possible. When creating the cage, I had trouble with the feet as it kept collapsing at her toes. Alec told me that because the soles of her shoes were below the ground plane, this caused the cage to sit too high, unable to cross the axis. After moving Charli above the ground place, the cage worked as it was supposed to.
When I moved onto the hair, as Charli’s hair was not symmetrical the cage created for skin weights could not recognise the shape of the mesh. This caused issues when skinning, so I decided to wait until the rest of the rig was finished before creating the controls for the hair.
I moved onto creating the face controls by adding markers to specific parts of Charli’s face, including her eyebrows, eyes, cheeks, nose, lips and jaw. After the controls were created, I was happy with most of the face. However, I had to repaint a few areas where the weights had not applied properly, such as the eyebrows, eyelashes and the jaw.
I waited until I had begun animating to decide if I wanted to add joints to her T-shirt and trouser drawstrings. With the limited time we had at this point in semester 2, I felt it was best to rig them both. I experimented using proximity wrap at this point with various parts of Charli’s mesh, such as her trousers, bralette and top. The trousers were an area that I had struggled with throughout the rigging process as her legs kept poking through the mesh. I managed to fix many of these issues by repainting the hip and root joints, but I found that the proximity wrap helped with this around her thighs. However, the area at the top of her legs kept poking through. Therefore, I felt I had slightly more control with painting the skin weights.
For the T-Shirt, I created a loft between two nurbs circles and made joints and controls which would control the loft rather than the T-shirt itself. I felt that using this method would make painting the skin weights easier as the loft didn’t have the same folds and detail as the T-shirt did. Therefore, using it as a driver for the proximity wrap would cut out issues I would have later on when trying to balance the T-shirt’s weights. I managed to create a rig using this method I was happy with, however, due to the influences of the T-shirt, I kept having issues with double transformations. To finish the rig, I ended up using the joints I had already created for the loft and decided it would be best to spend time on the skin weights for the top itself and I knew I could create a rig this way that would not be affected by double transformations. For a future rig, I would like to experiment with simulating baggy clothing such as this, however, I feel due to our limited time to finish the film this way of rigging was the best option.
I also quickly found an issue with the proximity wrap and blender. As we were rendering in blender, all animations had to be exported as an fbx. The animations along with the proximity wrap did not export as the mesh was no longer bound to the skeleton, so when Charli was moving in blender the mesh of the bralette stayed in its origin position. I feel as though if we were rendering in Maya the proximity wrap could have worked well for certain areas that were skin tight, however, for this project the best solution ended up being to skin the character the way I originally knew how.
Other Rigging Research:
I also relearned how to create and use blendshapes for the top as I felt, considering its bagginess, there would be certain ways I wanted the top to move with when moving her arms a certain way. I tried creating blendshapes on duplicates of the top, however, when I moved Charli’s arms and keyed the blendshapes, her sleeves would snap back to her those position. Because of this, I created blendshapes directly onto her T-shirt for different arm positions. These blendshapes also helped with an issue I was having with the inner layer poking through the top layer. To help with this, I also duplicated her T-shirt, deleted the inner layer, skinned the single layer T-shirt and copied these weights over to the original T-shirt.
Two weeks before submission, I noticed that after I had finished the full rig, 2 of the corner mouth controls were no longer working. I spent a bit of time trying to fix them by redoing the whole face rig and just the mouth section after copying her skin weights over to a duplicate mesh to try and preserve them, however, they would not copy over after the new face rig was completed. Since we were so close to submission, I decided to animate with the remaining working controls.
Final Rig:
For our film I rigged an open and closed version of Charli’s sketchbook, a pencil and a phone that we didn’t end up using. For her laptop and the chair and table in the café, I either added parent constrains or I keyframed the mesh to move at the same pace as Charli. For the sketchbook tabs, I created 2 controls per tab to allow for as much secondary movement as possible. I also created quick sets in maya to allow for the selection of all tabs at once.
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