To finish off Fidget, she just needs some texture and rigging. Throughout this blog I used a PureRef Page to make sure I always had references and I used the Hard Brush, and the artistic brushes in Substance Painter.
Texturing!
Now that Fidget was all modelled, I get to do the most fun part which is giving her texture!
Before I started on adding any elements I wanted to check for any issues on the surface of my model, which there was as I had suspected. So, I went back into Blender and fixed these up before exporting my FBX again (around the nose and lips, the knife and the shoulder crease).
I started off by baking my main mesh and then I went over to the Base colour tab and applied some flat colours to each part to make them a bit distinctive.
Then just like I did in my experiments, I followed alogn with the stylised texture to create some soft shading in a painterly style on my model.
However, once it came down to adding my highlight slope layer, I started to notice some issues with my unwrapping, I had mirrored some sides to save space on my Uvs and this meant that I got some off-putting results on my model. To fix this I decided to scrap this pass (since I wasn’t too far in) and go back to sort out these issues.
So I went back and rearranged my Uvs, unwrapping the nose, separating the arms, gloves and feet out as well as the waist and belt and such.
Then I copied the same steps above on this new UV set and it looked a lot better! I decided to use Green for the base of my model and this warm yellow as the light so I liked the gradation that this gave in my experiment, but this time I did it a bit lighter. Then I added in the Highlight Slope Fade and Highlight slope (my warm greens with a light generator and blur slope filter) and then inverted these for my Shadow Slope Fade and Shadow Slope (with a cooler blue-green and blue colour). I really liked how these turned out, so I went and converted these to a smart matierial so that I could fast copy these for the rest of my colours.
To apply these colours to the rest of the clothes and props, I took this smart material and did a combination of going through and changing its layer property and selecting the UVs in a black mask of a folder, or I just added a tint layer on top of the folders layers. I really like how this turned out! I really like this way if texturing, and I think it captures the exact style that my group was aiming for. The only thing I was a bit nervous on was how flat the back was, since this type of lighting is technically made for more statue like models, so I made a note to brush up this area to fix this problem.
Once I had my areas largely sorted, it was type to add on the details, to start I went and added the bandages on the face, arm and feet as wrappings I went and added some slight details not note where the wrappings would overlap. I also went and added some variations to my stones, I kept these vibrant and blue because I thought they would look nice in our cave setting. I also went and added some nail polish to the fingers and toe nails.
I also went ahead and added details to the googles, these didn’t come out well with my light generators so I went and hand painted these. Using bronzy colours to create a sort of gold like effect and then I used a blue to be the glass of the goggles that I painted these swirls on to add some whimsy and have this stylised glass effect.
I did a similar effect with the jewellery and painted some loose shadows where they connected with the body.
Then I added some eye effects to Fidget and painted the inside of her mouth, I gave her this big dilated pupils in dark blue, but decide to change these to be closer to black. I then also played around with having a highlight in it and I asked Tori for her advise on this and she thought it looked better with so I stuck with it.
To bring in our Hard shading and Borderlands style, I needed to add some line art. So, I added some Borderlands characters to my PureRef board and mimicked the lines, taking from various characters and using what looked best on Fidget. I think this added a LOT. The different between no line art and line art is actually quite startling, I was getting very excited for what Fidget was going to turn out like in the end. She was given some scratches in various places too to contextualise the bandages as if she was either clumsy or very carefree in fights (they added personality).
I played around with the idea of lining around the hair and scalp, but this just looked really bad so I scrapped this idea instantly.
I added some collarbones and the junction between the throat and chest as well as lining her belly button.
I then added in some clothing folds, went over the bandages and the nails and added her paint splotches to her pants. I’m not entirely sure I liked these splotches on their own, but I just decided to stick with them for now and see how they went.
Also I had went and painted on some design elements (I decided against modelling these or even multi-res and baking these onto a normal map, We as a group decided to try not to have too much surface texture and instead have painted effects to emulate painting these DnD minis to become your own character), including the ropes on the top and some back pockets.
Finally, I moved on to lining the goggles and the hair. The goggles were easy enough, just adding some circular shading and adding notches and scratches. The hair on the other hand gave me a lot of bother, I just wasn’t getting the results I wanted and I had to keep restarting, trying to work out the texture on the hair poofs and deciding if I should add strands like from the references, etc.
With that Fidget was all textured for now! I knew that I could (if there was time) go back and adjust any element on fidget if needed by just going back to Substance Painter, but these would be for small nit-picky elements.
And then this was her brought into Blender! I will be honest, I did go and show off my model because I was so happy with how she turned out, and she’s real and now I just have to get her moving with some rigging! Texturing is always a fun process, to me and I am having a really fun time getting more experience and learning new techniques in it Substance Painter and I can’t wait to learn a lot more techniques.
And then this is my turntable with her texture! (I set the roughness in Blender to 5 so that it would mimic the same texture that I was painting on in Substance and that worked a lot for me).
Rigging
Rigging is very new to me, like all the 3D elements before on this year. So I was a bit nervous starting to rig my model, I made sure to save a copy right before rigging (since I knew there was going to be a lot of issues).
First Attempt
My first attempt let me overcome my anxiety with destroying my model, and overcome that I will be bad in this (it’s my first time rigging a full model, of course I will be bad), this is something that I struggle with a lot in art and it can be really thought to overcome but I used my excitement for seeing Fidget move to help overcome this fear.
I set up my armature as follows, with a master control bone, a Skin bone that made as tall as my models pelvis and then extruded up the spine from there. I set up the tilt table bones like in a previous experiment to get the movement I wanted and then worked on adding my right side bones, the arm, fingers, ears and hair (all areas I had wanted movement in).
Then I went and Auto named the bones, symmetrised and parented with automatic weights.
Straight away I noticed some issues, mainly with the computer not knowing how to separate out the props so I had to go and Weight Paint to make all of these follow my stand’s bone and that fixed these out.
The ear I will add more bones to get more flexibility in them, two bones made them feel quite stiff and moving them also effected the eyelid for some reason, so again weight painting these will be necessary
The hips were also a bit of an issue for me, since I had the dagger and bag sitting on here, I think if I make the skin bone higher up and have mobility around the waist up instead of the hips up that this would move a bit more like I had envisioned.
Also the hair just didn’t work for me this way, I think it was because I put this extra bone instead of just the floating bone for the hair. I cant decide if pairing these with empty groups instead of automatic weights may be better for this, but I can experiment in my next run through with setting up my rig.
Also, I have no idea why I added two bones into the head but it did some silly things, noted down to only have one bone next time.
After some minor weight painting I managed to a get bit of a working rig, but I now know A) what to fix with my deform bones and B) How much time weight painting will take to correct the automatic weights…
Second Attempt
My second attempt I had a better idea of how to approach, and I followed a similar step as my last attempt.
With the armature all built up I then parented these to my model with automatic weights and looked for any of the problem areas so that I could know where to weight paint. Things liek the rocks on the stand moving with the arms, the eyelid clipping into the eye here.
I also sorted out this Master control to be a circle. As well as setting up the tilt control set up, but for some reason one of my tilt points didn’t restrict the rotation properly, despite it having the exact same settings as the rest of these points. I didn’t really know how to fix it so I have left it as is for now and asked my group for any help on this.
Then I went and assigned certain areas to the vertex groups, since I knew I wanted the goggles and bits of the hair to be mainly on the head bone. I also went and quickly painted the base to the stand bone, so there were no wayward rocks.
I also realised that I was missing an ear bone so I quickly added that by extruding in edit mode, giving it the appropriate name and creating its own vertex group as well.
It was also at this time that I realised my model was a bit slanted in posture, bit of an accident but I know 
Also since I was dreading weight painting I decided to add a quick look at controller. So I separated my eyeballs and placed empties exactly in the middle of them, bringing them outside, putting another empty in front of those and then parenting them both to this look at controller. Then to finish this off I just added a damped track to each eye and respective empty and that was all done. It was also with this that I realised that my texture was a bit iffy on my model, since I painted them with just the face front in mind and moving these about made me discover some wayward lines and colours. I noted this down to have another pass on Substance to fix any issues that came to light when rigging.
Weight Painting
Before I started weight painting the different areas, I set up this short animation to help me as I went along, to keep an eye on the movements.
Note: Sound Warning- Loud Buzzing in this clip so mute before playing!
I started off with the head first, since I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted this to look like and how to achieve this. I first turned on the auto normalise on my brush, and then normalised all the weights. I started on the hair, making sure the hair on the scalp moved with the head and not the little hair poofs, BUT I actually left some influence on the strands around the metal clip as if they are tugging on these parts when they move. I just liked how this looked and thought it was a nice detail, and the video below shows before the weight painting and after this.
Then I went and sorted out the ear movements, removing the stretching on the side of the face and hair, as well as removing those clipping eyelids.
Note: Sound Warning- Loud Buzzing in this clip so mute before playing!
I then took a look at our weight painting exercise from class and realised that I could get away with not having that extra shoulder bone, so I saved a copy of the file and deleted the shoulder bones and their respective vertex groups, and connected the bones together that were there. I also turned on my wireframes for the body, since there was a lot more bones and thus it was a bit finnicky to work around into parts. I also found this issue where the hair would randomly have influence over this clavicle area so it needed to be checked routinely to fix this.
I spent most of my time trying to work out these shoulder areas. I found that it always ended up with this really awful movement. I just couldn’t get the balance of influence correct for ages, it took a lot of time and effort and painting but eventually I got a result that I was able to say, that’s fine and could move onto the other parts of the model.
Note: Sound Warning- Loud Buzzing in this clip so mute before playing!
Note: Sound Warning- Loud Buzzing in this clip so mute before playing!
I decided to leave the hands and arms alone, since they had no major issues that I had spotted, but I did correct some of the spine areas and around the connection with the stand and the organic movement. For this I just made sure the belt didn’t shift on the movement and that it was a largely subtle influence of rotation on these bones.
This was my final result after weight painting, I could sit for hours and tweak and fix it but I do have a time constraint. I decided to send this out for some feedback and Joyce responded saying that it looked fine, so I let it be for now.
Note: Sound Warning- Loud Buzzing in this clip so mute before playing!
The reason I was a bit bothered was the rib expanding on movement, I had this painted this way as when I moved my arm up like this in real life, I found the ribcage followed up and I tried to recreate this. However it does look a bit off from some angles so this may be something I change and see if it works better.
Controllers
Then I just went and changed my bones into suitable controllers.
I also didn’t really see a need to change these hand bones intro controllers since interacting with them this was a bit easier for my brain to understand. I went and asked my group if they had wanted me to change them at all for them, but they didn’t really seem to mind.
Shape Keys
Then I went and worked on adding some shape keys to bring emotions in. I knew we needed at least a shocked expression, maybe one for being scared or fear and then one for curiosity when they are exploring at the start. I found that using the shape keys allowed me to get some nix expressions with my eyebrows since I could deform them for emotions. I had an issue when creating my blink, i think this had something to do with my subdivision bringing some parts apart from each other (like my lips that don’t start closed…).
I didn’t get all of the facial parts that I had wanted finished but I had noted to get them done the next day, and the following just shows off what elements I was able to achieve.
IK
I wanted to set up some IK because it would make animation some movements easier, but for some reason I really struggled when it came to adding the pole. Setting up the IK one constraint was very straightforward, I had forgot to set up a pole here to help this movement so I will look to redo this with the pole and see if that helps.
And then I took a small break, as I did all this in one day and was quite tired…
While I am working on elements I always share how the work goes as I do it to keep my teammates updated and receive any critiques on my work, and Tori had answered with some feedback on the eyebrow movement. So I made a note to change this around.
Texture Fixing
One of the issues I wanted to try fix was this line over my eyeball textures. However I found that the way I have the eyes in the same texture as the body they overlapped no matter what I did (paining straight on the UVs them selves or the model). So, unfortunately I just had to leave them as is and I just informed my group members of this issue so that when it came to animating they were conscious to think carefully on the eye movements. While I was also in Substance Painter I decided to add another tone onto my iris that I thought made it look that bit nicer, as well as fixing up the highlights in the eye.
Finishing Facial Rig
I went and finished off the facial keys from the day before. I had added a fixed blink, the mouth opening, smile and frown and adjusted the eyebrows. I had also ( prompted from Joyce, who while not in my group was giving me more feedback and interaction than my group members were), added dilation of the pupils and iris, this was done by just making a shape key on the eye mesh. There were so much more elements that I knew I could add and I could spend ages tweaking little areas back and forth, but since we had a time strain I decided to just leave it be and let myself be content with things not being perfect.
You can see the line on the eye being quite noticeable here, but since the look at controller will exist, you can see that with animation and context of the actions in it this line shouldn’t be too noticeable.
Once I had all of the shape keys that I had wanted I went to set up bones to be my controllers for them. I changed these to be the shapes that I thought worked best and then worked on setting up the drivers for these.
Thankfully the only bit of math I had to do was for setting up my eyelid controllers, who knew you needed to use a calculator to make models. So I just found the multiplication I needed by dividing 1 by the current drivers value and popped this into the driver window.
I also fixed the blink movement, setting it up in two stages to make it a progressive movement, just like it did with Suzanne in class and this time it worked a lot better!
So I just repeated this same process over for each driver and added limits to each controller to make them easy to navigate
And so this is my final facial rig for this assignment, like I said before I could definitely go and change up lots of these elements and make them work better, etc but this is what I have stuck with and I think it has a pretty good range of movement and covers what I will need her to do.
Extra Shape Keys
Once I had my facial controllers done, I thought it would be nice to have some other movements on my model that could work for capturing overlapping animation and follow-through on my model. I did this all using shape keys and drivers, but I’m sure that I could have also done with bones in the armature.
Painting Ribs
The way my ribs were moving wasn’t to my liking so I wanted to go and change this. So I decided to experiment with some weight painting to adjust the amount of pulling that happened in this area to see what looked nicer. I did this on a Copy of my working file in case anything went wrong.
This was the comparison result that I had made to share to my group to get some feedback, which wasn’t too helpful… but once again Joyce came and helped out, she preferred the right side, so I may do another little experiment to test this before applying it to my actual working model.
Note: Sound Warning- Loud Buzzing in this clip so mute before playing!
So I went and painted onto my model, starting with just one side. I went and decreased the amount that the ribs got pulled, not so they wouldn’t get pulled at all but just a small amount and I thought that this looked better than before. Once I was happy I just looked at how I got this affect and recreated it to the other side. This was the last bit of weight painting that I needed to finish off my model and I was so happy to have it all done.
Note: Sound Warning- Loud Buzzing in this clip so mute before playing!
Note: Sound Warning- Loud Buzzing in this clip so mute before playing!
IK… Again
I wanted to give IK another try, since I knew it would be nice to have on the model and I knew I could set it up.
Again, i’m not sure that I was able to really set the pole up correctly, having my character in an A-Pose helped with rigging but I just couldn’t wrap my head around where to face my pole, I knew it would point toward the X axis of my pole but even knowing this I couldn’t get the placement of it correct.
Below you can see the attempts at my IK, I was also able to turn the IK off and on by setting up a custom properties on another controller bone I created to turn the influence off and on for these. I think that I may give this one last go, but I honestly can just see myself animating the arm manually and doing more research in IK for future models.
IK… Again…Again
I decided to look online for some support on how to best adjust the pole, and I found this helpful, quick article.
I deleted my previous poles and then started by extruding them out again, removing these bones parents and renaming. Then I just used the pole angle to adjust where I thought looked best for the elbow to face and this time I was able to get it to work! (at least it looks correct to me)
To finish off my rig I had wanted to make it so you could interact with all the bones without having to turn on the show in front on the armature. This was mainly an issue on the fingers, where I had tried to set up an intuitive way to adjust these. This didn’t end up working though so I had gotten rid of the custom shapes and just turned on what I had before, so we can animated with the bones shown and just turn it off before rendering if it causes an issue.
Just to show off my body functionality I did one last screen recording of her movements and capabilities and that was it. Fidget was all done!
This process was really valuable to me, I was able to find a lot of areas that I can still improve in as well as areas that I have quite a good grasp on. I think that rigging was fun, but just like Mike said it is like learning different solutions and understanding each piece will let you built up a full rig depending on what is needed for it to do. I really enjoyed learning about the bone constraints and techniques and while I struggled a lot with rigging at the start, I think applying it to my character helped me get a better grasp on what we learnt throughout the lessons, and I actually had a lot of fun seeing her come to life. I will hope to improve on these skills over summer and make more models to explore all of what Blender and model making has to offer.