R&D: Rigging (Patreon)

Ah yes, every animator's favorite subject.

So I spent a bit of time in the past few months practicing rigging, both partially and from the ground up.  I thought I'd organize my thoughts on the matter and write it down in a post.

What did I learn?

- How to create, edit, and manipulate bones.

- How to create an armature from scratch and assign it to a mesh.

- How to rig simple to complex IK constraints

- Assigning automatic bone weights, and all of the potential failures associated with them.

- How to best use the weight painting function, including when and when not to use it.

- What UV maps really are, how they're organized in blender, how they're assigned, how they can transfer to different meshes, and how they behave when combined with other meshes/maps.

- What supplementary Blender plugins there are in order to make the rigging process as a whole much easier.

What don't I understand still?

- What a variety of the bone constraints are capable of.

- How to assign shapes to bones, or why you would even do so in the first place.

- What are drivers exactly?  How do they work, how do you set them up, and what are their benefits?

- How do you set up supplementary rig UI to access through the properties panel?

- Facial rigging, vagina rigging, and hair rigging.

How does this help improve my animations?

- Wider variety of models to select from, now that I can rig from scratch.

- Better understanding of how armatures work, so when things break it's easier to figure out why.

- Less breakage and faster workflow when animating.

Supplements:

Subject 1:

Justabouts was nice enough to lend me one of his models so I could rig it from the ground up as a practice exercise.  Thanks to the plentiful amount of polygons and the relatively smooth topology, I didn't really hit many hitches with this model.

(There wasn't any material for this model at the stage I got it so I just painted her gold.)

From the head all the way down to the toes, I was able to get everything rigged from scratch and create the pose you see above.  The only thing I didn't get into was the face, but that's a whole can of worms for another time.  Aside from a few weight painting issues with the arms, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.  It's really a very pretty model and I'm grateful that I was able to get my hands on it.

In case you didn't recognize it, this is an early permutation of Justabout's Aloy model.

Subject 2:

I also ended up learning a lot when grafting the Hotdog dick model to Mets' Ciri model.  It's something I had been trying for a long time, but utilized knowledge from so many different aspects of Blender that I could never really pull it off.  This was the first time I was able to actually do it, though it's far from perfect.

In order to do this seamlessly I had to:

1. Join the two armatures together.

2. Combine both meshes while also combining the UV maps of both.

3. Go through each vertex between the models and stitch them up Frankenstein-style in order to create one continuous mesh (this part was awful).

4. Blend the textures of the dick and the torso together.

5. Match the materials so that they had all the proper maps and settings.

6. Fix the wonky weight paints created from the mesh/armature merges.

7. Sculpt the seem between the dick and the torso to create something that looks much better.

Needless to say, it was a rough time.  I'm happy with how the final product looks, but the topology of the model itself is horrendous and if I move it the wrong way it absolutely breaks.  I'll need to improve the part where I join the vertices and fix the weight paints in the future.

Conclusion:

I still have quite a bit to learn about Blender, but the less unknowns I have to tackle in an animation, the more confident I get.  I'm still at the point with the program where it could crash my computer at any moment, so there's a bit of hesitance every time I boot it up.  I'll take any dose of comfortability I can get.

Next up, some fluid simulation and more DAZ3D fun!