KDA Akali: A short Behind the Scenes-ish. (Patreon)

So, this is a little weird to do, because I think it's the very first time I do this. I can't even remember if I did it with Nico... I though I should make this post because maybe someone can benefit from it.

But anyway. I did a few changes to Akali, one of them being artificially increase the poly count.

I wrote a lenghty post about increasing poly count on dA, I think you can still find it.

What I basically did was:

- Convert Tris to Quads.

- Add Subdivision Surface Smooth (SubD,) value 1.

- Remove all of the flexes so I can apply SubD to the model.

I lost a few details, but nothing too serious.

After that, it was time to try to rig.

I looked a few methods on the Internet about how you do them, and with that in mind, I developed my own method for it.

In here, you see there's 2 kinds of bones: Green bones and Red bones.

Green Bones are bones that are going to be present on the final rig for mesh manipulation.

Red Bones are bones that are going to be deleted, but they serve a purpose.

When you use in "Add Automatic Weights" in Blender, most bones will get mesh influence until they find another bone. That's where the Red Bones are in for. They are there to limit the influence of the useful bones. Once their job is done, two things are done:

1) All of the red bone weights that should be for the Jaw are added to a Jaw weight, thus making our Jaw bone weight.

2) Every other red bone weight are added to the Head, thus making our Head bone weight.

For me, the best result I can find is having a working Jaw.

Unfortunately, this is always a mixed bag of results, so you are going to end up doing this more than 5 times. It can be pretty time consuming. And that's what I got.

This was a little test to see which weights should the Jaw bone have. I liked this result.

Once that is done, it's all matter of using Transfer Weights to the Mouth mesh, clean the Mouth mesh weights, specifically the Head, Jaw and Lips weights, and then we have a working rig!

Goofs

When I was taking the screenshots, I just noticed something and made me laugh like an idiot for more time than I care to admit. I'm sorry.

Also, when I was working on the bodygroups, I noticed something and it caught my eye pretty hard...

I don't know why, but in that angle, that hair kinda reminded me of Frankie Foster...

Also, blue glove says hi :D

So yeah, this is the Rig method I use whenever I fuck up and accept a non-face-rigged models. I hope you guys found it interesting!