finished rig

Here he is, fully skinned and rigged and everythings all good!
I havn't posted in a while for a few reasons, mainly that there have been numerous issues while skinning and I have chosen to plough through them without the distraction of blogging it all. However, I will do my best to some up the problems and solutions now.

First off, the initial attempt at painting weights failed because the geometery was all seperate. While this made it far easier to do each section, it also meant that every movement resulted in the limbs coming apart at the seams. The obvious solution to this was to detatch the skin, and combine the mesh. This sorted out that problem to some extent, but I had forgotten to merge the edges and vertices, meaning it still came apart where it had been combined. So I had to go back and combine it again, this time merging the edges/vertices. Unfortunately though, I deleting the history after doing so, which meant the links between the blendshapes and the standard head were lost. So I had to repeat the process from scratch, this time only deleting history on the body.
The next major issue was the bag, as weighting it to all the sections of the spine meant it deformed unreaslistically. The solution to this was to weight it only to the middle and upper spine.
Another problem is with the smooth option. While it seemed necissary to smoth the weights for a lot of joints, such as the spine sections, doing it for everything caused a lot of limbs such as the hands and feet to deform all wrong, and I found I had to re-weight a lot of areas as a result.

It's all done now though, and generally I am very pleased with the result. There are a couple of things I would still like to sort out, but due to time restrictions I am just going to have to pass it on to Phil and start the other character. For example, the left wrist/hand controllers are out of line to the wrist joint. This doesn't effect the practicality of the rig in any way, it's just untidy and annoys me. Also. there is a section of the bag texture that stretches heavily when deformed, causing a massive green patch to appear on his lower back when he bends. Phil assures me that this can be avoided on camera, so I will try not to loose too much sleep over it. The final unsolved issue, and to me the most frustrating, is that the attributes that have been connected to other attributes on the facial rig (the rotation and translation of the eyebrows, and the blink) do not work if the head has been moved from its default position. I will think more on why this could be tomorrow while I still have a chance to sort it out.

Other than that, I'd say I'm happy with it!