Extended Practice: Creating the Chinese Ancient Character - Rigging, Binding and Animation Tests

Rigging 
I then moved onto the rigging process for the Chinese character and once again followed the same videos that I had done previously in order to generate the rig for this character. This first part proved very simple and I was able to create the rig in about 5 mins as it was very similar to the rig on Keith and Menes. I first started with the leg and feet joints.

I then moved onto the arms, ensuring that the rig followed the arms and not the sleeves.

I then added in the joint for his spine, and then ensured that I joined the rest of the joint chain up so that it was all connected.

I then moved onto the head, adding in joints for the ears, eyes, brows and nose so that everything could be moved and made sure everything was connected correctly.

Controls 
I then moved onto adding in the controls for him, again following the videos from Mat. I added in the basic circular controls, and then some custom ones as well for the ears, spine, feet and the master control.

 I moved onto constraining the controls to the joints in order to be able to control him. This process was again fairly simple as I had already done it for Keith, and Menes, and this rig is less important as it will not be moving too much.

I then also parented the controls to the joints so that when the control was rotated the rest of the joints moved with it, like for example when the head is moved the facial features follow it and move as well.

Finally I added in IK handles onto the legs as previously done, in order to get the correct leg movement that I desired and this finished her off completely before attaching the rig to the geometry.

I also  constrained the knee control to the joints using the pole vector constraint as this enables the side to side knee movement that is needed to show movement in the knee/leg.

The controls are then parented to the master controls at the bottom and the root joint now can control most of the movement in the body to complete the control points.

I then went back at the end to colour in controls, something that I couldn't do originally when making them and it seemed to be because they were in a layer at the bottom right hand side. To overcome this problem I removed it from the group, coloured the controls for the left and right and then added them back into the group as this seemed to work then.

Skinning 

I then moved onto binding the character and ensuring that the movement of the character worked correctly and fully. I first choose the correct settings that would work the best for me and this was again following my tutors videos so that I could ensure that I was doing the right thing. 

 I then looked at the model in more detail and noticed that there were a few things that needed sorting out with the model, and this involved painting the weights on the model so that the joints moved in the correct way and moved correctly. This was the part of the process that took the longest and I wanted to ensure that it worked effectively so I took a lot of time at this to ensure that it was looking as good as it could.

 Once the painting of the weights was done I did a quick test on all the joints to make sure that they were working correctly, which they were and they were looking good.

I then moved onto adding in the extra details on the model which involved looking at how we could get the heel to peel off the floor and the toe to point when moved up. These little details that can be added add a lot to the model, and especially was this character will only be basically walking around the environment. These details don't have to be added but when looking at the model with them it looks a lot better and more professional.


Test Animations
Before animating I first took some video references of the kind of movements he would be doing in the test animations, so I recorded Stuart Brown doing the movements for me, the same way he had done for Keith and Menes. For Cheng I again wanted four basic movements that could be carried into the final game; walk, talk/interaction with Keith, idle and wave.

I then moved onto creating some test animations and cycles that I could recreate for the final outcome for the interactions and dialog. Cheng's character is a lot more reserved than the others and she is very quiet and keeps herself to herself so I wanted to try and reflect this in the character movements.

Animation Frame List:
With a one second pause in between all movements.

1 - 154 = Walk

178 - 250 = Bow (Idle)

278 - 418 = Talk (6 Seconds)

442 - 514 = Looking Around - Bored (Idle)