#rigging&animation

[cjc288ggvd2research]

Walk Cycle:

I found this section very tedious to develop a proper fully functioning walk cycle. Since i did not create all the joints for the fingers, I should have created an IK handle that controls the whole arm, instead of stopping at the wrist, thus making it easier to move them. Also, I had some complications getting used to setting the key frames, which resulted in a rather poor walk cycle.

[cjc288ggvd2research]

Skinning & Weights

Skinning & Weights:

I skinned the character and assigned weights to the mesh. I had a problem which affected Maya terribly; when I used Interactive Bind to skin the skeleton to the upper body and the head, Maya kept crashing. I attempted this more than once, however to no avail. Instead I skinned those parts using Smooth Bind like I did with the lower body. This seemed to work, however the eyes were not linked to the mesh. When I tried to link them, using various approaches, I encountered several problems. I finally created a separate layer for them to deal with this issue after all the process is done. 

[cjc288ggvd2research]

Assigning Further Controls:

In this video, I added some  other essential controls to the rig. These will eventually be very useful when animating the rig to crate a walk cycle. After completing this video, I realized that it would be better to create a constraint to control the control the IK on the arms. 

[cjc288ggvd2research]

Assigning IK Handles & Constrains

Assigning IK Handles & Constrains:

After I arranged the skeleton and added more joints, I set up the IK handles for the legs and arms. After the IK handles were set, I started adding constraints. These are used to aid the animator to rig the character easily. I used the same process as shown in the video to create other constraints and non-renderable controllers.

[cjc288ggvd2research]

Assigning a Skeleton to the Mesh

Assigning a Skeleton to the Mesh:

In this video, I created a simple skeleton for the character. However, I realised I had forgotten to add some joints and I immediately arranged the skeleton, similarly to the process shown in this video.