This week we had a look at learning how to rig with armatures. We already had a small look at how armatures worked last week, however this week we were doing it with an actual character.
I wasn’t in class this week, however I followed along with the rigging tutorial on Blackboard.
Our job was to rig this robot so that it would be ready for animation. A robot was handy to start off with as its structure is more rigid and doesn’t deform the same as a normal body mesh.
The initial process reminded me of the process of placing bones back in the 3D Digital Literacy module – I placed bones along the middle of the robot and then along one side of it, auto-named the ones at the side as left and right, and mirrored them – then the mirrored bones automatically were named as left.
Instead of parenting the bones to the body with automatic weights this time, though, we parented them with empty groups.
This was to show us how to assign different parts of the mesh to different bones using vertex groups – this was particularly useful with the robot as we can be specific about which parts are moved by which bones.
Eventually I had everything assigned, and as well as that, I changed the way that the bones looked in pose mode, and made the main bones all red while making the master control green.
As well as that, I adjusted the location, rotation and scale on the different bones for it to be easier for me to control. Additionally, I added this pose as the robot’s zero pose, which can be helpful when moving or animating characters when you want their pose to go back to the default.
I was adding bone constraints and initially had some trouble properly applying the constraints shown in the video to help the claw move.
I don’t fully remember how but I eventually managed to fix it and got it working properly. The lower claw had “copy rotation” on it so that the top claw moved together with it, and the top claw had “limit rotation” so that it would only rotate the amount shown in the image above.
Next I learnt a little bit about IK controls.
IK stands for “Inverse Kinematic” and you can use these controls for animating arms on characters, for example. I created a test arm to follow along with the tutorial on Blackboard.
The IK pole was acting a bit strangely in my file, however overall, the test was a success!
I found this set-up really interesting and I figured it could be helpful for me when animating my character, so I set it up in the robot as well.
I did have a bit of difficulty at first, but most of it could be fixed by adjusting the roll on the different arm bones (as that needs to be set up correctly for the IK controls to work) and then I was happy enough with them! It felt a little more intuitive moving the arms like that rather than having to move things around individually, so I was glad that I learnt this.
That was me done with the robot, however I also had a look at the weight painting exercise.
I wasn’t familiar with what weight painting really was, as I hadn’t had any experience with it previously, but it involves marking which vertices on your model are going to be affected by which bones, and to what degree. You can “paint” these vertices individually, or assign them, or you can do them in the arguably more intuitive method of “painting” the amount of influence on the model.
A useful setting to turn on here is “auto-normalise” while painting – this means that, for example, if on the bottom bone here you mark an area as having a strong influence, the top bone is automatically going to have that area painted as low-influence. However, if you forget to turn this setting on, you can thankfully normalise you weights in Weights > Normalise all.
Our task in this exercise was to adjust the weight painting mistakes on this model. An animation was set for the different parts of the model to move, which showed the different mistakes, such as parts of the mesh moving when they shouldn’t, or moving in ways that looks incorrect.
It was really tricky trying to adjust this, but also quite fun and a good way to become familiar with how weight painting works.
It was a bit of a struggle and I didn’t get it perfectly, but I also used weight painting for this animation by making the other fingers be influence by only one finger bone. I found it interesting that weight painting can be used in this way too.
It wasn’t perfect, but eventually I pretty much got the model working the way it was supposed to, and I felt more confident about weight painting now.
However, after completing these exercises, I continued on working on my model.
This week, I was using the full body tutorial from Dikko to help me out with creating the body for my character.
Firstly, though, I worked on polishing up a few more things on the head of my model, including the eyes, mouth and ears.
Every now and then, I would have to change the topology of things to work better.
Eventually, though, I was happy enough with how things were looking, and I was able to finally move onto making the body.
It was a little tricky at first, but I managed to create a basic wireframe for what I wanted to do along the modelling sheet I had.
I was wondering how I would manage to connect everything up in the end as there weren’t nearly as many polygons on the body as on the face, however for now I just followed along with the video and figured I would figure out loop cuts etc. later on.
The shoulders were a little tricky and awkward to work out, but eventually I got them working okay.
Slowly but surely, I could start connecting things up.
And so, his body was slowly being created and it all started coming together.
The topology wasn’t perfect, but it was still a work in progress. I decided that for the arms and legs, with Clarence having some fancy shapes around the arm and leg sleeves, I would first create the basic limb shapes and then work from there.
(I was struggling with keeping up with work around this time period, so some of the work I did on my actual model pertaining to the topics in this post, such as armatures, IK controls and weight painting, were still done but will be covered in future week blog posts.)