Rigging, Skinning and Posing the Captain

 29-31/12/21 - Week 13

To finish off the character before creating the unreal scene I wanted to pose my character. I used max for this and also created a morph target for the facial features.

I first started by rigging my character, I decided to add some bones for each of the ponytails so I could pose them properly. Originally I was going to add some for the ropes but since I am not entirely confident with rigging I decided to leave it for this project.

I then created my pose along with a few others and tested my character with the base colour attached, this was to make sure I fully ironed out most of/all of the incorrect skinning. Most of these issues were with the arms and hair. I chose quite an extreme pose for the left arm, which meant that it took me a while to make this look somewhat normal. The hair also took a while as I found parts were attached to lots of different parts and I also needed to play about with the top part of each ponytail and how much this was attached to the head.

Once I'd finished, this was the result I got which I was pretty happy with. I was trying to recreate the pose from my original concept and though I found that in some places this was a bit impossible since my anatomy isn't the best, I created a pose that had the adventurous and bold feel that I was trying to convey.

I then tried to add in the morph target. This is where I was experiencing issues.

Morph targets must have the same amounts of verts that are the exact same as the original mesh. I didn't understand how to separate the head from the body since it was animated and skinned, and this would in effect break the skinning. So the only option was to duplicate the entire body and then just edit the face to how I wanted it. Once I did this though, it basically broke my animation.

After getting this result, obviously something wasn't working as it should. After trying to find help on the glitch and trying many different work arounds I eventually found that the reason why my model was doing this was because obviously my morph target was posed in animation, so once put on the keyframe where my morph target was in the same animation as the original model, it would basically double the animation. This is why it looked like this.

This only means that my morph target is now sort of my animation slider. This is not ideal but it still works and I will just have to be even more careful next time so that my character has a proper animation slider.
However, for this project this is suitable and I have a fully rigged and posed character with a facial expression. Without this I think it would have made the character look a lot more "dead". I am looking forward to seeing this character fully lit and properly presented.