Saturday, 10 May 2014

Going Live - Rigging

After finishing the 3D model of the Tree-Hand, it was onto the rigging. Treated the rigging as a normal human hand, with dual joints for better deformations. Made sure all the joints were orientated the same way:

I did a quick test once some of the joints were in place to check the fingers/branches were moving in the right direction:

Checking the joint orientations as I go:

All the joints in place and in the right hierarchy, next step was to Bind Skin of model to the joints:

Weight painting - came across a problem at first where weights I had just painted were being re-distributed when I moved onto another joint to weight paint, fixed the problem but locking the weights in the paint skin weights tool:

Continued painting skin weights:

Made sure the branches on the back of the hand only moved with the wrist joint so that they would still stand up fairly straight when the hand is first curled up and distorted:

The next step was to add controls for the joints, I colour-coded them for each finger/branch to make selecting them less difficult to see:

 Testing out the finished rig and controls:

Last step was to add a Global Control, which allows the rig and model to be scaled, moved and rotated together when imported/referenced into a scene:

Here are some rendered images of the rig controls:


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