Thursday 10 December 2015

Technical Art - VIII

With my script being finished all I needed to do was model skinning: after watching the live demonstration  the lecture and the labs I started skinning my model by using the Smooth Binding first and then refining weights with the Weight Painting Tool.
At first I was confused and I couldn't exactly wrap my head around the concept of skin weights as sometimes painting something over some vertices would undo previous work which I had done, but thanks to the separated meshes and after watching some tutorials (especially this tutorial from Jason Baskin) I started having some nice results.

The end result was quite satisfying, even though some bits of my mesh are not deforming properly (especially around shoulders) I think the overall model looks quite smooth which is what I wanted to achieve by the end of the process.

The problem with the shoulders was probably brought up by the way the model topology was laid out, I think that having a different starting pose would have made easier but by the time I realised that it was too late and there was nothing I could have done, the process of skinning was actually very interesting because it ties up all the "invisible" work done through the rig in a very tangible way.

Now that I have been through the full process of rigging and skinning a model I feel more confident in my ability to judge model topology and predict how the model would deform.

I believe this is a never ending process that is usually refined over time and the only thing that can guide towards the decision of the topology of a model is the experience gained in previous attempts to rig and skin other models.

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