Miro board link with project pipeline:
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOKHnfj0=/
This week I have been working on both of the projects main rigs: the fisherman and the cat.
Fisherman:
On Youtube I have found this channel which explains thoroughly how to rig a humanoid characters adding the main and basic features that a model would need. This sets of videos are different according to which part of the body they are explaining.
Feet Control
This video explains how to rig the feet of the character to add foot and toes rolls and how the hierarchy of both the controls an d the rig would work
Following the video I have applied these notions to my character
I have created the IK handles for the foot: the ball and the toe
This is the hierarchy of the foot in the outliner: I have grouped each IK handle and nesting them within each other according to the movement of the foot I after parent constraint the main group to the foot control that I would use to move it.
I have created two attributed to the foot control for the foot and toe roll
Legs Controls
This leg control video was useful to make the legs bend but sticking to the ground at the same time which is very useful for a walk cycle
For the leg Ik handle I have used the following settings checking the sticky options which allowed me to make the feet sticking to the ground when the legs bend.
The video also showed how to created a pole vector to point the knee direction which is made bu selecting the pole and pole constraint it to the leg handle.
Spine Controls
Differently to the legs the spine follows a FK control and this video explain well the dynamics
I have created three controllers and parent constraint them to each joint of the spine and nested them to follow the movement of the parent.
Arms Controls
The arms also follow a FK system where the shoulder joint is the parent and the elbow and the wrist are the child and the wrist itself the child of the elbow joint.
Hands Controls
In order for the fingers to curl I have created a set of driven keys using attributes belonging to the wrist control one for each finger where the top joint, which is parented to the others, curl when the attribute is activated (on 1)
To create the keys I have used the set driven key editor where I have created an attribute for each finger
Head Controls
Following this tutorial I have created a control for the head and parent constrain it ti the head joint to allow the character to roll the head and twist it too.
Eyes Controls
the face controls for the characters are the following: one for each brow, one for each moustache and the eyes controls one for each eye and a general one: the eyes are aim constrained to the controls to have his pupils moving along having the head still. the eyes controls are going to be nested to the main body control directly so that when the character moves the eyes won’t be still.
If when I will import the character into the main scene I will have to adjust his size I can scale it with the main body control using constraint scale
outliner clean up
This is the final groups arrangement for the character.
paint weight head turn
After each control was assigned and working I polished the character movements with skin weights, in the following picture I was skin weighting the head making sure that the shoulders were not influenced and the ears as well.
Cat project
Cat rig
following the same process that I use for the fisherman, I adjusted the main cat rig.
structure of the rig
Feet won’t stay attached to the ground where the chest or hip controls were pulled down because the feet controls should not be parent to them but to the main body control.
Controls in the leg to sit
rearranged the controls FK
rearranged the controls FK to help the cat sit and move better: at first I thought that the cat body hierarchy was going to be different compared to a biped one, however I have experimented with it and I have found that parenting everything to the hips works just as well, apart for the feet so that they will stick to the ground when the hips are bending.
Binded the skin using these settings
skin weight on the spine adjusting the influence for the joint controls
do the skin weight for the legs especially the rear ones, was very challenging since they are going to bend and stretch very much especially when the cat will sit down
Just like I did for the fisherman I have created the eyes controls where I have also created the eye blink using the set driven keys editor
I have also created an attribute for the foot roll which will help for the walk cycle
For the eye blink I have created two sets of eyes, one open and one closed and keyed their visibility to create the illusion of an eye blink
I have also created the whiskers for the cat by modeling and scaling down a cylinder and duplicating it.
Foe the skin weight I have found to be more accurate the colour ramp which uses a range of different colours where red is where the joint has more influence on and dark blue the least influence on.
I have also skin weighted the brows which will help to add expressions to the character
Same for the mouth corners which will move independently from each other