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This week 25 – 31 August has definitely had its ups and downs. This week I did Gronky’s rig weighting and a little bit of remodelling to fix up some dodgy topology around the shoulders.

As of right now (Sunday evening), everything below the belly is pretty much done and working as it should be, and everything above the chest on the other hand has been pissing me off royally for the last couple of days. I’m throwing everything I’ve got at the arms in particular and it just isn’t enough to make it work.

I’m going to take a step back from beating my head against it and swot up on what other folks have done – I’ve accepted I can’t work this one out on my own without direct assistance or studying some working rigs other people have made. As an added twist, Gronky’s topology is a bit odd – necks usually come out the tops of chests, not out of the front of the chest – but at least some of the conventional wisdom should apply, right? I hope so.

I might experiment with a Mesh Deform modifier in the coming week as an alternative to directly rig weighting Gronky’s mesh. Worth a try.

I’ve also discovered more caveats about working in Blender than I ever wanted to know about. The biggest ones from this week are:

  • don’t leave the Basis shape key by itself, especially not with X mirror going, or it may get up to mischief – for instance, retaining mirrored vertices but joining them together with different edges on the opposite side of the mesh, or throwing away the changes you just made to the mesh for fun;
  • X mirror sometimes doesn’t pay attention, requiring manual tedious copying of X Y and Z coordinates after Find Asymmetrical identifies the shiny new asymmetrical vertices in your previously symmetrical mesh;
  • even better, Find Asymmetrical doesn’t always find the asymmetrical vertices – fortunately one half of the mesh as a vertex group after being mirrored back and forth a few times can weed the fiendish little bastards out;
  • vertex groups used for bone deformation appear to be subject to rounding, so in extreme poses vertices with small unused weights will suddenly pop on reaching a particular threshold (“clean vertex group” and “normalise” are your friends)

All of these delighful glitches can be found in this week’s videos, of which there are many (Billy I am so sorry):

Big thanks to everyone who’s been following the project so far. Your interest in my humble little newbie cartoon is keeping me honest. Hopefully the struggles I’m going through don’t put you off making your own CG short one day if that’s what you’re dreaming of doing. The pain is worth it! 🙂

Monday Edit: It turns out that what I’m trying to do – create a rig that can successfully handle any arm pose I throw at it – is advanced rig-fu and a rite of passage for novice riggers such as myself. MakeHuman’s approach looks the most promising but even good-looking static poses on its output rig break when I transition between them. I may have to be sensible and limit Gronky’s “pose space” to what the rig can handle. Better recheck those storyboards…

By quollism

A creator of quollity stuff.

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