Making Progress!

I went ahead and learnt how to create stretchy limbs/arms, and I applied the principles to my rig. I am glad to say I had no problems and everything is working fine so far. So at the moment I have full IK handles for the arms/legs with the stretch ability.

Problem with blendshapes on squirrel rig solved.

I spoke to Clym about a problem I was having with squirrel rig I made. The issue was mainly about the rig not functioning properly once I used some of the facial controls. Clym helped me with this and explained it was to do with the inputs, and the skin cluster being at the top of the list. I have taken note of this and will bear this in mind for future rigs. Thnks for the help Clym.

Skeleton

Heres the skeleton I have made. I am being very strict with naming each joint too so that I have no problems mirroring. Next up will be the IK handles and then the stretchy features.

Next model I will rig.

I found this rig/model called Joe which is really simple and stylised. The character reminds me of the kid in my grp film, so I decided I would go ahead and rig it. As before I have deleted everything apart from the mesh so I create the rig from scratch. I will be aiming to give the rig stretchy limbs/arms, reverse footlock and possibly FK/IK switching.

Analysis of rig

Right, creating that rig sure was an experience. I did learn alot, and my confidence is slowly increasing although there still are a lot of problems that have been left unanswered which I need to solve asap. I think the areas that caused me the most problems were skinning/ painting weights, because I was not able to figure out solutions, which resulted in certain parts of the model not working properly (the ears, right hand and fingers). The area I enjoyed the most was creating the blendshapes as it was less technical than the other areas and I actually had fun whilst doing it.

For my next rig I am going to use a slightly more humanoid model I think, as I can experiment and add different features. I want to make sure I get the weights painted properly on my next rig and add a reverse footlock as I was not able to for this model.

Blendshapes done

I am glad to say one area I am quite confident with in rigging is blendshapes. It has to be the most enjoyable part of it all so far. Seeing as this rig has quite a few issues I decided not to go crazy and make every single blendshape possible but do the main shapes so I could give him facial expressions. I will for my next rig however, get much more indepth and detailed.

There are 12 different blendshapes I have made which I know is not nearly enough to have a really expressive rig. I used the soft mod tool to manipulate the mesh, for some reason I did not switch on reflectivity which means some of the parts are a little off (e.g. the eye lids shutting are different in both eyes), guess I just forgot. Doing all these just reminds me why topology is so important and why I have spent so much time making sure I can make models that deform properly.

I am losing the will...

Where to begin.. I have been having a lot of trouble. I managed to sort out most of the weight issues for my rig, aside from some extremely weird problems. The weights seem to vanish from the ears every time I paint them, so I decided to just leave it be. I tried a few things but nothing seems to work.

Clym was kind enough to help me out with a few problems I had, mainly how to add some rotation to the IK controllers to allow the hands to bend and how to sort out some joint issues using the component editor. This helped me out big time and I feel I am starting to get to grips with things. That being said however, I am having some problems that I just cannot seem to figure out like why half the joints in the hands have removed themselves from the joint hierarchy and why they wont reconnect. This has resulted in me not being able to create set driven keys for most of the joints in the hands. I guess I will have to keep learning and improve with my next rig. The next stage for this rig is blendshapes which I actually feel confident with, lets hope things stay that way. I will not give up, no matter how much I wanna scream.