Willie finished!

Today I spent my time trying to work out solutions to those nagging issues presented in the last post. I enlisted the help of both Jaimee Perrin and Dan Dalli for this one.

The green stretch-marks from the bag when the spine deforms held the simplest answer, and that was to simply recolour the affected faces. It stills leaves a noticeable trail of stretched geometery, though Phil assures me this wont matter as the shots will largely avoid angles from the back of the character.

Upon the discovery of the 'keep history' option in the detatch skin menu, I could detatch the skin carefree enabling me to sort out the off-centered hand controller. I also put in some extra edge loops around the knees to help it deform smoother when bending. I found I also had to re-do the reverse foot setup on the right side of the model, as for some reason the geometery was twisting upon movement.

I also learnt that the reason the eyes and eyebrows would not blink or move properly was because I had actually skinned them to the head joint. The solution was to simply detatch them from the bones and parent them to the head controller instead.

There are some things I would like to do for my next rigging attempt, a big one is to sort out the knees. They currently dent inwards when straight, whereas on the rig Phil downloaded for animation practice there is an attribute devoted to straightening out the knees in their extended position. I also want to get the feet working as fluently as they do on that; in mine they stay quite rigid despite the weighting. I also noticed in the channel box on said rig some of those dividers that I had read about early on. I feel these must be quite useful if I am ever to develope a controller with multiple functions for one joint. One more thing about that rig that I want to understand are distance locators. These seem to be useful for an animator who want's precision in distances for smoothly looped motion.

Either way that's it for Willie now, I'm happy with this and I'm ready to pass it on for animation and blast my way through setting up his sister, Pocahontis.