Monday 27 February 2012

Graded Unit Character Rigging

I've been working quite a lot over the past few days trying to get my character completely modelled, rigged, skinned and final textured.  So far I've done the modelling and rigging and I've almost completed the skinning - I used CAT to create a quick and dirty rig, but now that I have some experience in using it I was able to avoid the problems that I had with it when I used it on my last project, for instance I like to create three bones for the legs rather than two; a thigh bone, a calf bone and a bone which sits near the knee cap which helps keep the volume of the leg when deforming.  However when you create three legs bones in CAT and rotate the Pelvis backward and knee buckles, this doesn't happen when you use two bones for the legs, so I've decided to use two and the Skin Morph modifier for any clean up work.  Also CAT deals with IK chains in a very, very strange way; rather than putting the IK goal at the pivot of the last bone (like Max's Bones would), it places it at the pivot point of the next bone in the hierarchy (or where the next bone would be) as such you get something that looks like a foot roll.  Because of this my character's arms were animated using FK which is a much slower process I found compared to IK.  Below is an image of my work so far.

Left to Right: CAT rig, base mesh, base mesh with accessories

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