This week Zhenzhong made the character model based on Wanxuan’s sketch and I focusing on character rigging. After I received the model, I finished the character rig by myself.
The character rig is a full handmade rig, which takes me several days to finish. It is a full character rig which covers both body rig and the facial rig. The main body is an ik/fk system which covers ik and fk spine with a basic squash & stretch system, and ik/fk system for limbs. I also made a 360 degree foot controler so that animator can make tiptoe or heel animation much easier. It is pity that I don’t have time to make the squash & stretch system for character’s limbs, which can give animator the opportunity to do some cartoon style animation.
The character rig also has facial system, which covers eyebrow controlers, cheek controlers, jaw controlers, lip controlers and ik/fk eye controlers. I used a blended mode of skeleton based and blendshape based rig system to finish this character rig. Honestly, building the structure of this rig doesn’t takes much time. Instead, painting skin weight and making blendshapes take most of the time because both of them determines the flexibility of this rig.
After I finished the rig I also take some time to check the bugs in this system. I adjust the blendshapes, the skin weight for serval times, which takes a lot of time to finish. The rig also has problem when the main controler scaled. I then find out that the problem comes from the squash and stretch spine system because of the wrong data that transfered within the node editor. I adjust several nodes and fixed the problem.
I also tried to add some sub controlers to the clothes to avoid the crossing between models. However the sub controlers’ shape doesn’t scale when I scale the whole model. I used serveral methods to fix this problem but failed. I will do a further research on this to try to solve this bug. What’s more, I think the cheek control can be improved to be more flexible, but I may not have time to develop it deeper because I need to focus on texturing in further process, which is also a tough work.
Next week Ziyin may start to make the layout and animation. Therefore, me and Zhenzhong will then focusing on texturing and rendering. We will try several techniques to achieve the rendering result that we want in maya. I think we can finish all the textures before the animation finished so that we may save a lot of time for rendering and lighting.