Character and Narrative: rigging aint no game yo

So I moved on from modelling to making the skeleton of the model. The process was pretty straight forward for me as we already went through it with the demo character. However my characters skeleton was a bit diffrent because it had a hunched back and no neck.

(skeleton of the bully character)

So the skleton part took no time at all. I moved on with making the controllers. As I followed the video tutorials I had the controls in no time. However orienting the joints and the controllers was a challenge for me, because I did not completely understand what I am doing and why. By this point I started mindlessly folowing the videos without really understanding them.

 

And that's not good because I had to redo all the orientations as they weren't done properly, mainly because at some point I have done something I shouldn't- freeze the transformations, so whenever I would orient something the joint would fly off. Bet the second time around it was all good

Then I moved on to setting the Hierarchy of the joints, which seemed not that difficult. To be fair the hierarchy part was pretty straight forward. The hand is the child of the forearm, the forearm is the child of elbow and so on. And the whole father of them all is the root control!!

(controller hierarchy)

And then came the dreaded connecting the mesh to the rig. When it came to that I lost the SDK handles for the legs for some reason. The leg controls just did not work. I figured there's not much I can do until the next session, so I went on doing the UV map. That was pretty easy, however the hands posed a bit of a challenge to cut up so I inserted a few edge loops to help.

 

(Character UV)

After I applied the UV texture the model just broke. It could not move and the more I tried moving it the more the UV moved from place but not the character. I had no clue what went wrong. I asked Matt and he pin pointed the mistake streight away. Appearantly you cannot add geometry after connecting the mesh to the rig, and that is what I did when I was cutting up the UV maps. But thank the Maya Gods it was an easy fix, I just needed to detach the mesh from the rig and reconnect ir again. After that everything worked fine, even the legs for some reason started working.

(Mesh connected to the rig)

 I felt really relieved that all my hard work with the rig did not go to waste! With high spirits I moved on to painting the weights.