Rigging (17/3/2014)

* Today I cracked on with the rigging, so that I would be ready for animating sooner than later.

First I added 'New Bone's to the rigged feet thinking that I would need to bend the feet. However, when I realised I wouldn't for shoes I deleted the 'New Bone'. Instead, I went into 'Edit Poly' so as to edit the current feet.

When I finally got round to rigging the model, I was advised to texture my whole character model one colour and set it so that if I set it to a certain slide (100) it would become transparent due to reducing its 'opacity' as seen below (before and after).

Even after you have rigged a model, you can change its textures, therefore doing this would be ok and beneficial to me, as without it you can not see the model you are trying to rig.
Speaking of which, I put the rigging over the model before editing it appropriately e.g. raising the shoulders and adjusting the neck etc.

Realising that I had forgotten to do the fingers, I then worked on them. At first I struggled with them as they wouldn't correctly stretch, therefore, I scaled them 

Selecting 'Skin' on the modifier list, I was able to add an 'Animation Layer' to the character model and rig. Thus allowing me to animate whenever the red button on the screen is red. 

I was advised to make the rig transparent and re-texture the character model, as I need to see any glitches made when stretching and bending the model for animation.

Reducing the opacity allows me to see right through the rig.

But, adding textures to my model seemed to cover the whole character. Therefore, I will have to fix this issue next week. 

Adding extras and preparing for rigging (10/3/2014)

* After remembering to put my model on the correct coordinates ('0' X axis), I realised that the wrists connecting the hands and arms together looked really poor (see below).

Therefore, so as to be ready for rigging next week, I decided to add a 'Torus' to the right wrist before using the 'Symmetry' tool to add it to the other. 

Making sure to 'Collapse All' the existing modifers on the model, I then decided to use 'Turbosmooth' for the hands to make them look realistic.

Realsing that the smooth hands then clashed with the arms, I decided to do the same technique on them.

I then tried to use 'Turbosmooth' on the face as it was incredibly blocky, unfortantly the results wern't so succesful...

* Still unable to get the hair style I wanted to work, my lecturer suggested that I stop worrying about it and work on the animation as that is what I will be primarily marked on. Therefore, I kept the blond hair, made sure to 'Collapse All' everything before rigging using the 'CATparent''s setting 'Base Human'.

 
I then roughly rescaled the model ready for next week.

Note taking and final editing (3/3/2014)

* Today I followed our lecturer's instructions as he showed us how to rig our character models by wrapping them with a 'cat rig'. See notes below...

• Keep the knees bent! Otherwise straight legs can stop the figure from correctly bending its legs.
• Scale the rig to fit your model using the 'local' viewpoint. 
• You only have to rig one half of the figure as you can copy and paste the half you have done to the other side. 
• Edit the rig when necessary e.g. make the feet the same size. You can also a 'New Bone' so as to add animation potential e.g. the tip of your character's toes.
• Fit the spine and ribcage to the character's torso. 
• Don't make the spine off center at any point, as it can drastically affect your whole model. If you can't go back to a previous step then it is just best to start again, as it would be quicker. 
• Always set a key on '0' out of '100' as that first frame will hold the whole model's information. 

* Once I was shown the above I then made the final adjustments to my model as I was told it was the last time I would have the chance to edit it.

First I added straps to the goggles and string to the necklace by editing a simple plane.

 I then did the same tactic for the belt buckle.

I then worked on the pupils for the eyes by unwrapping the eyes before using Photoshop to make the pupils as seen below.

 

As you can see, the above pupil wasn't quite right. Therefore, I went with the more stylised version below that actually suits the model better.