FMP - Week 20 - Part 1

Rigging, skinning and posing

Time to post my progress so far. My time recently has just been taken up rigging and skinning the character so that he can be posed for my final presentation.

While I've rigged in Maya before, namely for my Overwatch character, I decided to rig in 3Ds for this character because he is fairly simple in terms of humanoid form and it shouldn't be too difficult to rig him with a normal 3Ds Max biped. Here is my biped:  

Those strange pale yellow shapes behind the biped are large tail bones that I've added in for his cape, and once his biped was all aligned up with the character it was time for skinning. 

Skinning is the process of attaching a mesh to a biped so that when you move the bones of the biped the mesh moves with it, and this is where the loops around the elbows, knees, hips etc come in handy as it is this stage when those loops are needed to support animation and deformation of those joints. 

After the skinning process is finished, its onto posing the character, which can be both the most fun and most frustrating part. The human eye can really easily tell when a pose doesn't 'work', but working out why is the tricky part, whether the weight is distributed wrong, or something simple like the fact that a human never holds its arms or legs out with straight joints unless its holding weight, but even then, overextending limbs can be painful, so if a human can't do it, a character shouldn't. 

Its little things like this that help sell poses, and in lieu of spending hours and hours studying the human form, a good tip I've found is to get a reference image of a real human in the pose I want my character to have so that I can reference the rotation of hips, shoulders, head etc. 

Here is my final pose: 

His hands are positioned to (hopefully) be holding a spell of a similar magic to the green orbs that will be over his shoulders and head, this will be done with alpha planes if I have enough time later.