Before this project I had never done anything with rigging or 3D animation before so I had a lot of struggles along the way to create something that I could use for the animation task. For this rigging task I chose to use one of the provided unrigged models to work from as I knew that my own model from last term would not work as I don’t have experience in that area either and that if there were to be large issues with it I wouldn’t be able to fix them easily therefore I chose a model I knew I could work with easier and have less problems. I started this rigging process by creating the joints following the lab sessions provided, I followed these videos and the live sessions to learn this process. I first started by adding in all of the main joints to the model and making sure that everything was placed in the correct place and at the correct angles as seen in these example photos below. I did this by using the “add joint” option from the rigging menu and placing and moving them into place using the front and side views for reference. Once I had half of the model done I then mirrored it across so it would be symmetrical. I decided not to do the fingers on the model as if I was using my own character from last term she had mitten like hands so I wanted to still work to making animations that would have worked on my original character.
Once I had the joints done I then started to work on orientation. This part of the process took me the longest as I had learn what the proper orientation looked like. I was able to orient them correctly after some struggle. To do this I used the orient joint menu and the rotations to change the angle of them to point the right way. Once I had done this I was able to bind the skin to test my model to see if it worked correctly. Unfortunately for me it did not work correctly the first time so I unbound the skin and changed some of the arm and leg joint placements as I had not made some of them straight enough from the front or curved them enough from the side so there was some issues with the movement. Once I had the joints working correctly after 2 tries I then bound the skin again so I could continue with the rigging process which I will talk about in the second post.
