For this week's activity, I applied a rig to the character I modelled and textured for the previous activity. As I have very little experience in the field of rigging, this proved to be a very difficult activity. It took me a couple of attempts to get the joint structure correct so that it would bind to the mesh properly and move in a desirable way and still be simple enough to allow it to be imported into Unity without any troubles. After getting the bones right, I created the controllers for each of the limbs, etc, using NURB circles and locators (with pole vectors attached to the elbow and knee points). At first, I applied parent constraints from the controllers to their respective joints and, after binding the mesh to the joints, this caused some major issues, mainly on the hands. The hands and a couple of other body parts would stretch and fold strangely as I moved the mesh around. After deleting the parent constrints and cleaning up the heirarchy, I applied orient constraints to the hands and this solved the problem. The other problems lied within the default weights Maya applied to the mesh. After sifting through each of the joints and their weights, the rig was pretty much complete. There are still a few issues with it but it should be fine for use in the animatic for the end of semester.
After creating the rig, I attempted importing it into Unity. It imported without any trouble and there didn't seem to be any problems. Hopefully I can use what I learned from the problems I had with this rig, as well as what I did correctly, to create the other characters for the final animatic with a bit more ease.
below is a screenshot of the character rig:
No comments:
Post a Comment