Major: Skinning (Part 4)

 I started working on pose space deformers/corrective blendshapes after blending the body completely. I started with the shoulder as the tutorial suggests, but I did find myself having some issues working on the geometry of the shoulder (particularly the shirt as it creases against the chest), so I will come back to these later. For now, I focused on fixing the up and down poses for the shoulder as well as beginning to edit the forwards and backwards poses, and then completing the elbow and wrist deformers. I intend to move on to fixing the pieces of the lower body that are simpler first and then, as the shorts are similarly shaped to the shirt sleeve, probably having to go back and spend more time on them. 

After I have finished these, I plan on completing the body rig and moving on to the 2D facial rigging should everything go to plan (accompanied by sorting out remaining issues such as the skirt and reskinning the different head shapes and the individual character accessories). In the meantime, I would also like to work on the textures for my environments and props so they can be lit and fully completed as soon as possible to make some basic turnarounds for them, as well as finishing leftover concept art that I have not yet been able to get to.

Major: Skinning (Part 3)

Following blending the upper body, I moved on to doing the same for the lower body. There are, again, issues which will be corrected with pose space deformers. Otherwise, blending is now done and I am ready to move onto making them.

Major: Skinning (Part 2)

After weight grouping the geometry, I had to blend the weights on the upper body, starting with the fingers. After this, I moved on to the wrist, elbow, shoulder and clavicle, and then the neck and rest of the torso. After finishing, I mirrored the skin weights across to the right side of the body. 

There are still some remaining issues to be ironed out with regards to the geometry and how it moves. These will likely be alleviated when beginning to use pose space deformers later on.

Next, I am going to blend the lower body.

Major: Skinning (Part 1)

 Next, I began to skin the body by binding the mesh to the joints and painting weights onto it. I left out the head and body accessories (including the skirt) as I will need to figure these out later on individually and would prefer to focus on the main body to start with.

The next thing to do is to blend the upper and lower body, before moving on to pose space deformers.

Major: Rigging (Part 5)

 Next, I put in the head joints for the human base. I will probably have to come back and change the positioning of some of the joints once I apply the rig to the cat and dog bases once it's finished, but for now, the skeleton for the bases is finished. This time, I had to create the extra joints and parent them accordingly, organise the outliner, and colour in the controls for the rig. 

One thing that's different between my skeleton and the skeleton shown in the tutorials is the lack of jaw and eyeball joints. As my characters have 2D facial rigs instead, they evidently lack both the jaw and eyes, so making the joints would be unnecessary.

I realised that, as Kit's hair is so far back from their head, it would collide with the tutorial's placement of the neck controls. To remedy this, I moved them backwards. For the dog and cat rigs, I could probably edit the control vertices on the shape to move them backwards as to not mess with anything set in place at the moment. At this time, I also realised that the skirt intersected with part of the pelvis control so I used the same solution to make it slightly bigger.

The next thing to do is begin the skinning process.

Major: Rigging (Part 4)

 Today, I finished rigging the arms by adding in the controls, parenting them, and adjusting them by using the 'Add Attribute' and 'Set Driven Key' features to be able to do things such as spread the fingers out or modify one finger joint at a time using a control. After these were all made on both the left and right arms, I added in limits for each of the controls to restrict how far they can move to prevent possible problems when animating later on.

Next, I will finish the skeleton before moving on to skinning and pose space deformers.