What I did:
In order to ensure I did things thoroughly, I went back to where I’d left off on the Udemy course: Blender 3D – From Zero to Your First Character! by Gustavo Rosa. He really is a very good tutor, showing step-by-step what you need to do, and he explains why things are done, rather than just saying, “Do this”. He explains vertex groups, what all the rig handles control, how to limit controls to certain axis to reduce the chance of limbs looking broken, and he even gives you a checklist for your model before you actually start the rigging process.
There were many steps to follow, and settings to change to make life easier when rigging the character model. I followed the instructions to the letter, but I did encounter issues – not Gustavo’s fault!
When I cleaned up my model for rigging, and removed the body from underneath the clothes, I had an inner mesh on the inside of the suit and shoes – I didn’t realise this would cause issues, but it did as soon as I got to the deformation. Even with weight painting, the internal mesh was breaking through the outer mesh. When I tried weight painting the shoes and trousers, I encountered problems with the left and right sticking together. With the inner mesh being an issue, and then the shoes, I decided to revert to an earlier incremental save and work some more on my mesh.
I hadn’t realised how close the legs were at the very top, so it was quite a lengthy process to fix this, but I made sure there was a small gap between the top inner thighs. I removed the inner mesh from every part of the character, this also took a while, but I’m sure it was faster than trying to mess about with a double-skinned mesh. It’s all a learning process, I’ll know what to do for the next model.
To make sure I didn’t miss any steps, I followed the tutorial a second time on double speed, it’s always easier the second time!
I used the Blender Rigify add-on, viewed it in edit mode and resized and positioned each bone to fit my model. I removed the facial bones from the rig as instructed in the tutorial, these will be added in later with shape keys and bones. Each bone was positioned precisely and the bone rolls adjusted, before selecting the rig and mesh to parent with automatic weights. The automatic weights did a decent enough job, but there was still a bit of adjustment needed.
In the course, the model they are using has clothes separate to the body, and there is a chapter later on which deals with transfering the weight to the clothes, but the character in the tutorials is a very simple stylised character, so maybe it’s okay to do that in certain circumstances, but I have followed my own tutor’s instructions and removed the body. There’s a chance that if I’d continued through the lessons, I may have been able to fix the issues I was having, but I chose to revert and start again to potentially save time.
Bones:
Controls:
Weight painting:
Posed character:
What I learned:
Although I thought my geometry was ready for rigging, it turns out it still needed more work. I made a choice to go back a couple of steps – I think this was a good decision. If I’d continued a few more chapters and then couldn’t fix the issues, there would’ve been a lot more to redo.
I’ve learned a lot in this section which will inform my next character model.
Next:
Next on the agenda is to create the face rig – exciting times!
