3D Model Rigging 01

(Holiday? What is this holiday that you speak of? I know not.)

Week 1 - Day 1 to 4 (Because I completely forgot about blogging until just now?)

This week, our first challenger greeted us with a fist to the face. Not literally, of course. I'm talking metaphorically. It's name is Rigger and it is kicking my metaphorical butt. Keat started us off easy with a demonstration using the cake model where it's a mostly rigid prop and where the only thing that'll be moving at all is the lid where Emelyn will be popping out of. I'm actually not too sure how many joints I'll be needing for it? Whether it's just the two joints on the lids for the up and down motion or whether it needs to be connected to the body as well? I'll need to ask Keat on Monday but I've got a feeling it'll be the latter...which is no big deal because it's hardly a complicated piece of rigging to have in a prop.

Cake Rigging

BUT THE ACTUAL CHARACTER MODEL!! Now, THAT is a different story...

Keat printed out our models so we could draw where we think the joints ought to go in the model so I thought, "oh, this'll be easy". Oh, how I was wrong...so, so, so wrong. 

What I think would happen...

What actually happened...

So, anyway, this rigging/jointing thing is...complicated? Less so than UV texturing and 3D modelling but still a right piece of work. The minimal amount of joints I thought would work in my photoshop trial will NOT ACTUALLY WORK because there's just not enough information to work from. There were the spinal joints to consider, which joint is connected to which to control the bunny ears, the long hair, the long fringe in the front, the extra joint for the butt because why not? And then the arms connected to the shoulder connected to the spine in the middle of the body but not actually from the next like I thought it would - SO MANY PIECES. You can compare my first foray into what I assumed will work and what it actually turned out to be. Whoa, right??

NOTE - Always label and do spring-cleaning, but whatever you do, DO NOT GET RID OF THAT SMOOTH POLYGON OPTION, because you'll always want to be working from a low-poly resolution just to make things easier for yourself. Keat said that you COULD work from a high-poly model but there's a lot of extra edge-loops and a lot of extra information that's...redundant? Unnecessary? Needlessly complicated? Meh...

My second attempt at modelling is a lot better because I kind of know what not to do and I'm actually doing the labeling and cleaning along the way...I'll let you know how well that works when I'm done...and you can laugh as I crash and burn. Yay!