Nia, Boatswain & Blue - Rigging and Skinning

 18-22/04/22 - Week 15

This week I managed to rig all 3 characters. Unfortunately, I fell ill with covid at the end of last week so it did effect me this week and slowed me down. Thankfully, rigging and skinning didn't take as long as I thought it would for each character, so it balanced itself out time wise.

I first started with Nia, this was probably the easiest of the 3 to rig since she has a much more basic design that is tight fit. However, I did come across some issues one of them being my lack of thought into what to delete from each character - wasted tris - which ended up effecting me for another character as well. I think overall something that has effected me in all my projects is lack of forethinking which is where things like wasted planes really show up and make me use more of my time trying to fix these problems.

In the end it wasn't too problematic and I managed to get through rigging this character with relative ease by using a couple of extreme poses to try to get the best rigging I could. I then roughly put her into the position in the concept to get an idea of if my rigging was going correctly and where to adjust. In the end I ended up with the pose below:

Next, I started on the boatswain. He didn't really have much of a problem with planes that I didn't delete since the base of his character is probably even simpler than Nia's. I used the same process mentioned to work through the skinning process. Though what did trip me up was the belts and also the sagging on the pants. The belts took a while to get through and I ended up changing where they were rigged too a couple times but in the end I managed to get it looking decent. I also used a prop bone for the first time on the guns which was interesting but made things a lot easier for the guns that I planned to move with the hands. The trousers where a bit of an issue and I was trying to balance things between the thigh bones and the pelvis but eventually I got the hang of how weighted it should be to each of these parts.

This was the pose that I've settled with for the moment:

Finally, I moved on to Blue. As expected, this did take me the longest as she is the most complex. This is also where the problem about faces that I didn't think to delete became problematic as things like the neck had two layers that was really hard to access, and trying to see through the mesh when there is so much going on is really difficult. This also happened with the skirt and the shorts even though I couldn't really delete anything here to help cope with this anyway.

I added ponytail bones here, I ended up using 7 on each side as my previous project I tried to minimise on the bones and it created a very clunky look. I then also added extra bones for the wings which I also haven't included before but these were very simple to deal with and made skinning the wings very easy. Lastly, I also included a prop bone for the bells since they are attached to the hand.

I struggled with the skirt and parts hanging from the body a little bit since I wasn't sure where I wanted to rig it too but in the end I settled with mainly the pelvis, but had to do some small adjustments on the parts that touched the body. I also had to mess around with the bodice too as I had a very similar problem. 

Here's her pose:

Overall, I'm really happy with the rigs that I managed to create this week and I think it's going to be a good base for my animations next week, though obviously its pretty easy to adjust if I need to.

My plan for next week is pretty similar to this weeks, around 1.5 days per character for both morph targets and animation which I plan to do all by hand. I haven't animated before so it'll be interesting but hopefully I'll get a good result.