Character Modelling Part 5: Rigging and Weighting

Once I was happy that my model was UV textured, I then went onto placing a rig onto it, bind the mesh and rig together and all the objects to deform nicely. Below are GIFs and screengrabs of the rigging and weighting processes I had done for my model.

Rigging

This GIF above shows the joints placed in line with the model as well as a reverse footlock for the legs and an IK chain for both hands. The root bone is essentially the start of the rig, and usually should be placed at the hip or centre of the body. The next parts I added in was the bone for the chest, then the neck, and head. The joints for the arms started from the chest joint because that was centre for them both. I had added three joints for the arm: the shoulder, the elbow, and the hand. I added an IK chain from the shoulder to the hand and by doing this enabled me to move the arm around. For the leg, I made a reverse footlock from a tutorial given by my tutor to make a foot roll, toe lift and leg pivot. Once I had rigged everything for the character, I then bound it together by going to skin>smooth bind in the animation tabs. I first had to select the mesh then the rig from the root bone to bind together. Below is weighting explained.

Weighting

An issue with binding together a mesh with a rig is the weighting. Whatever ligament you'll move in Maya, the weighting on that part will affect other parts of the character; parts that should not even move at all. Below is a GIF animation of what happens when my character has not been weighted properly.

You'll notice that when I moved the left arm, the left side of the mask was following the hand joint when it should never. To sort this out, the paint weight tool in Maya helps to paint where the weighting should be and removing areas that were affected before. Below is what the weighting looks like in Maya.

This GIF shows what my character is supposed to look like when the weighting is sorted out on each bone. When a bone is selected, the white area shows where it is weighted to and the black is where there is no weighting. By having the weighting sorted on this model, the arms will no longer make the face melt when they move. You'll also notice that the hand on this part of my model has a controller attached to it; this helps the IK move only towards that point and becomes mandatory for animating.