3D Animation Project

In a similar fashion to the work I’ve covered last week, this week I have taken care of adding custom attributes and controllers to the upper body. At the end of this work session I had the spine, neck and head of the model rigged. The control shapes were the first to be added. I needed five different controllers affecting five different bones, some independently, some affecting two or more bones at a time. As seen above, these controllers were in order: COM controller (or the Master controller) – This controller serves as the main one: all the other (body) controllers have been linked to it. When moved, the whole body follows. The same is valid for rotation. Hips controller – This controller takes care of the hips movement (or the spine base). When rotated, the pelvis follows the rotation along with the hips. However, the first spine bone should rotate to a degree as well as a result. To get that effect, ‘Parameter Wiring’ has been used: a new Euler XYZ rota...

Having skinned the character, it was now time to take care of the IK and FK chains blending and add the (custom) controls for the rig. Adding a set of manipulators (controllers) is important because it ‘…makes it easy to animate by the animators’ whilst not adding any would result in ‘…making the pipeline of character animation more time-consuming, difficult and problematic’ (Bhati, Karbasi, Mahesar and Waqas, 2015). It all comes down to how easy an animator can control individual bones and bone chains, as instead without any controllers even selecting a bone would take much longer. However, the subject goes lengths beyond that with certain bones having bound to them certain reactions, constraints (limits) and more. I have started the process by freezing and hiding the mesh first, as using or interacting with it was not necessary for this task. Following an extensive online video guide I’ve found, I have started by creating an IK chain (using the ‘HI Solver’ option under the ‘Ani...

Last week I have finished skinning the upper body of the model, up to the hands. All that was left to skin were the fingers of the model, which is what I have decided to take care of this week. I have also started creating the IK chains and adding custom controls to the rig this week, but for the sake of continuity I will only make this post about the skinning process. The next post will be on the start of another task. That being said, skinning the fingers was a fairly easy process having already earned some experience up to this point. So I have applied all that I’ve learned and luckily I did not encounter any problems. The result can be seen in the illustration below. Looking back on the skinning process itself it was a fairly tough task that I didn’t enjoy quite as much as creating the custom rig or what was about to follow: adding custom controls to the rig. Bearing that in mind, I am positive on the fact that I’ve learned a lot by taking on to this task of skinn...