New Term!

Back once again. Was away for a week and a bit over Easter when I went up to Scotland, which was pretty cool. Edinburgh, especially, is lovely. Got back on Monday and was back in the studio Tuesday morning, bright and early. When I left, I left behind a fully rigged Lightning Mike who was in need of being bound, so that's what I got straight to work on. Before I go into that and the rest of the week's work, i'll go over some of the troubles I encountered when I was rigging the bugger.

Rigging Mike
So after I came to terms with the state of the model, accepted it's flaws etc, I got to work on the rigging. I really didn't expect to bump in to any more problems, as the rig was to be very basic with nothing fancy but lowe and behold, all hell broke loose. That might be a bit dramatic, but I encountered a problem which put a massive dent in my schedule.

The problem, as with Andy's rigs, was that the elbows were spazzing out to high heaven. Whenever i'd move the pole vectors anywhere near to the bones, they would start to go crazy and it was as if they were on reverse or something. I've snapped a screenshot of one of the many tests I made, but it doesn't really do it justice.




On the left of the image are two sets of joints that I created with very mild differences to the original bones of mike's arm (pictured right) that were going mental. The first picture shows them in the default pose, and you can see the problem in the second picture. I must've made about 20 or more difference joint chains whilst trying to figure this stupid thing out, and spent I don't know how many hours. The worst thing is though, that I never really nailed down what was going wrong. In the end I solved the problem by remodeling the arms so that there was more of a bend in the elbow. The only reason I can think for the trouble was that the IK handles just got confused and didn't know wtf was going. I won't be making the mistake again, though. Bent 4lyfe.

Since it's been a while since I encountered that problem, i'm not speaking as emphatically as I may have back when it was doing my head in, but that's probably a good thing. At least now it's solved, so I can go on to bigger and nastier problems.

Binding/Weighting

As I said, when I got back I went ahead with binding pretty much straight away. We have like 1 day left, so there's literally no time to waste. With that in mind, I started binding as quickly as I could, whilst being less picky than I usually am. The results are alright, I've a bunch of pictures of my character in the pose that I drew him in in the concept art, which is a moderately articulated pose and shows the level of weighting off quite well. In the pictures you'll notice an intersection on the glove (an area which is quite tricky, I think I could've placed the joints a fair bit better than I have), but that's about it. The shoulder is a tricky area but i'm hoping that it'll do for the small bit of test animation that i'm hoping to get done with him. It's a far cry from my hopes of a perfectly polished and working rig, but I guess that was a little too much to ask for.

Anywho. After rigging I started doing blendshapes, the first that i've done, which were in equal measures enjoyable and irritating. Not much to say, really, so let's get on with the pictures!


Did this for a laugh by flipping one of the renders. Looks pretty cool I think! But I forgot the moustache :O


Full body shot and a few caps of process/blendshapes


Happy! This is the initial shape I did, without an added shape that you can see in the picture above, which gives him dimples dawww.


Coolest angry face render i've done >:O

And that's about it. I'm very tempted to start my next character on Monday. Will need to chat to the tutors first, though. There's a lot about this guy that needs cleaning up and improving, but why dwell!? Looking forward to my next one :D