06/10/15 - Progress report

I've come to realize that Rigging deals with a lot of time consuming technical work - The past two weeks have been spent building up a skeleton for my model and proceeding to paint it and add controls to it.

Making an accurate skeleton only took a couple of days, but most of the last two weeks were spent working on an assignment for another class, so I neglected my 3D quite a bit and did not progress as quickly as i would have liked.  Regardless, my skeleton seems to work quite well, though figuring out the different ways to create rigid and more fluid/natural joints took a little bit of time.

First attempt at a skeleton actually yielded some flaws - The upper legs in this image are much too short and the character's core is not centered in the body.  Tutor was very helpful in helping me correct these flaws though!

I spent most of last week trying to paint my skin weights before rumors went around that we needed to have added controls in before binding the skin and painting.  I didn't get very far with it, but I was using a mouse and one of the students from the 3D class told me that it would be much easier to do with a tablet and pen.  Once I'm done with controls, I intend to properly paint my skinweights onto my character using my desktop at home.

Here is some of the progress I made with my skin weights though

Before Fixing

After Fixing

As of yesterday I've been setting up controls for my rig.  It is set up for FK controls at the moment, but I will be adding IK controls to the legs over the afternoon session.

Still need to work on hands and add constraints to the fingers, but I'll be working on those later on too.