Ned Bunsem Rigging, Handles and Weight Painting

The reason i listed rigging and animating as one of my deliverable is solely down to my previous animations which wasn't my best and i felt that having the awareness of the animating process would help in a CV and to reestablish my skills at animating. The thought process of rigging became much clearer to me and i noticed and understood why i had to do certain things which would affect a later piece of movement. So i began the rigging process by adding a skeleton and joints to particular areas of movements such as elbows, hips, neck and so on but then once that had been done i had to create the method of movements so adding controls to those specific joint movements.

Once that was in place i had to bind the skeleton to the model and then i had started to restrict particular movements such as the elbow moving in directions it shouldn't but also adding new forms of movements through IK handles to allow a more precise range of movement for something such as a heel movement. This process is daunting in trying to get the right angles and forms of movements before locking in the range of movements of the character but i was able to understand the thought process behind the locking of controls and in my previous character model i worked at a much tighter and free modelled character to which his feet weren't flat and that is where i realised why i needed to keep the feet flat to the floor and is something i noticed in the controls process as it made the workflow much smoother and relaxing.

 

Once the handles and controls were set i of course tried the controls out to see their movements and found anomalies in the characters movements from stretched legs to expanded arms and this at which point weight painting comes into affect. I had to do alot of weight painting and moving the character into various positions and as you can see in the image i had limited the amount of edge loops in certain areas which really did come in effect once the leg started to be positioned but weight painting had allowed me to smooth out the leg without adding edge loops. In the end the positions i place the character in weren't as streatched as before but looked much more fluid and is now ready to be used for animating.