After learning the basics of rigging, it was time to try rigging my own model. This proved to be a challenge as my model was very different from any examples we had previously done. It was almost too simple.

I started by adding the bones to the eyebrow, eye and main body, as well as a bone to be the master control which would move everything together. 

I ran into a few problems in this process, namely the pictured – the bones would not duplicate symmetrically on the right axis, even when the axis was changed. The bones had to be duplicated manually. 

I also had a problem with the rotation – I wanted the pin body to rotate as the model moved, but I didn’t want the eyes to clip through the set’s floor, so the eyes would have to move separately from the body. I tried several methods to remedy this, including weight painting, but finally what worked was separating the eyes and body and keeping them as separate models. 

I next used shape keys to add expressions to my character. I split the expressions into left side and right side, then proceeded to model ‘eyebrows down’, ‘fear eyebrows’, ‘iris shrink’, ‘eyes closed’, ‘face squash’ and ‘face stretch’, all of which could be combined into different facial expressions. This part was fairly easy and enjoyable, and I was told later on by one of my teammates that the expressions on my character were fun to animate. 

With the master control, rotation and expressions done, the last task was to make controllers that would move the eyes. This proved to be quite difficult – the ‘iris-shrink’ shape key I had added so that the character would look cartoonishly scared meant that if I limited the irises (which were normally quite large) in their movement by 0.2 meters, then the shrunken irises wouldn’t be able move far at all. But if I made the limit longer, then the default irises would slide right outside the eyes if you moved the controller too far, I ended up using the former, as it would be annoying but if the small irises didn’t move far but it would look broken if the large irises weren’t limited to the eyes at all. 

This completed the rigging process.