3D Animation Project

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...

      Having finished skinning the bottom part of the model, I have moved up towards the top side, starting with the lower spine bone (or the lower back). Looking back on it, the lowest back area must’ve been the hardest to deal with out of all three back sections, as that’s where the pelvis vertices need to be blended in with the spine vertices. That means that the character’s back needs to bend in a natural way, slowly crossing from the pelvis section to the back section. If the vertices are not carefully blended and the jump is too abrupt between the two cross sections, then the character’s back will ‘break’ instead of bending as one would normally expect. This I found out by myself within minutes, having initially set the absolute effect value of the lower back section to 1.0 (or 100%), making the model look as if he’d snapped his spine each time I would try to bend him into a position. After multiple attempts I managed to get the hang of it and made a decently smo...

                 As I have finished building the custom rig (skeleton) for the model several weeks ago, I’ve now moved on to the skinning phase of the project. However, before starting I have watched several tutorial videos I’ve found on the internet to accustom myself with the controls and various options first.             I have started the process by selecting all the bones but the IK and FK ones, nubs excluded. To make it easier, I have saved the selection so that I can select all the bones quicker next time. I have then added a ‘Skin’ modifier to the model that bound the mesh to the bones. Now if I moved the forearm bone, the model’s arm would have followed.             After binding the mesh to the bones, I have then started the actual ‘skinning’ process. Now, there are several different ways in which a model c...

After establishing the necessary skills for a 3D Animator job role, I had to get a better understanding of what the processes involved in animation were and how do they work. Upon research, I have found out that there are two things that needed to be done in order to prepare the 3D model for animation. Those two processes are, in order: o    Rigging the model o    Skinning the model Rigging a model of any kind, be it a bipedal human or a different kind of creature, implies creating a ‘rig’ for the said model. A ‘rig’ is in its essence the skeleton of the chosen model. So, 3D rigging is ‘the process of creating a skeleton for a 3D model so it can move’ (Pluralsight, 2014). The process usually takes place first as without a rig the model can’t be moved or deformed, so it cannot be animated either. In order to create and enable control of a skeleton, the users are able to use a variety of tools. The tools I am interested in are: 1.   ...