Firstly, before any rigging could be done there were a few things I needed to get in order. To start with I realised that I had modelled my eyes in the wrong shape and altered them to better fit industry standard.

Now they don't look like they are bulging out of his head. Wonderful.

The next step was to clean up the mess I had made of the Outliner and set Surtr's origin point to world zero so that Advanced Skeleton could be run.

Next, I ran through the Advance Skeleton plug-in and set up the biped skeleton to be bound to my model.

This was my first attempt at building the skeleton. Everything looked good except the knees were backwards. Turns out I had the knee joints too far back and the plug-in was registering the back side as the knee since there was less geometry there.

This is the final position of my skeleton before the controllers were added

The other issue I had with the build was the controllers being inside the mesh in a few areas like the chest, arms and fingers, but it was an easy fix, no problem.

This is the final set up for my controllers before I started the skinning process.

This was the skin cage generated by Advanced Skeleton, it did a pretty good job, I needed to make a few tweaks to the positioning and scale of the fingers as they didn't quite line up with my mesh so I altered them before copying the skin weights across.

Copying the skin weights from the cage to the mesh gave me a good starting point, but there was still a LOT of painting to be done in order to have the character deform properly.

Below is some Before and after shots of the weight painting with various parts of the body.

Next I have my dynamic pose that shows off all the joints being moved at once into an extreme position. I used this pose as a keyframe while painting the weights to help me easily see where the problem areas were as I went. 

Overall I'm pretty happy with how the skinning turned out. I was worried that the clothes were going to turn out a lot worse than they did. It was a finicky process getting the weights for the straps that hang down in between the legs to deform properly. While the skirt isn't perfect, and pinches itself when the character is in an extreme pose it looks pretty good when in poses that I would consider standard.

The face rigging process was very saddening, I spent a few hours setting it up and making sure all my points were on the right vertices and edge loops.

My troubles began at the beginning, turns out my head model isn't symmetrical even though I copied and mirrored it, I'm not sure what I messed up but I was determined to push through.

Because of the lack of symmetry, it meant I had to place each of the points and edge loops twice and make sure they lined up so I didn't have any discrepancies. This process took several hours but I managed to get there in the end.

During this time I came across a bug that I couldn't fix without restarting Maya. 

At seemingly random moments when I interacted with any of the face geometry from Advanced Skeleton it would warp my eyes like the images above. This happened at least 30 times throughout the face rigging process and each time I would need to restart Maya to fix it and lose a little bit of progress. I saved very often but I always lost a couple of point placements every time which made this whole process take even more time.  

After getting through 95% of the entire face rig and dealing with all the bugs that came with it I ran into a roadblock I could not pass.

Surtr, is a demon, with an infernal skeleton head, and as such, does not have lips. Prior to starting this whole thing, I didn't know that lips were a prerequisite to have a face rig be generated, I was at this for hours, searching online for solutions and testing them out but none could solve the issue at hand. Because Surtr has... no lips..

Those two highlighted edge loops you see above were a couple of my attempts to push through to the end, in the first image I tried highlighting where I COULD fit some lips if he had any, but I received an error saying that the edge needs to be a closed loop.

The second image is my attempt at a closed loop. This is the only way to make one around the whole mouth, and while selecting it all I was very certain that even if it did let me generate the face it would be extremely broken. But I didn't get get that far, another error prevented rig generation. 

After scouring the online help forums and Youtube I came across a solution that fixed the issue for people that had non-symmetrical geometry.

This involved using the multi-select tool and selecting the continuous edge loop along with 3 vertices. One for the top lip middle, one for the bottom lip middle, and one for the corner of the mouth which MUST have an equal number of edges on each side of it. With all of these selected it was supposed to solve the issue of letting you generate the outer lip.

The problem with Surtr is that the only available continuous edge loop has 187 edges in it and I had to manually count them as I selected them to try and find the vertex at the 93rd and 94th edge.
Being near my wits end with this Face rig at this point, I said this would be the last thing I try. I was out of options anyway if this didn't work.

Lo and behold, I got the same errors as before. There was nothing more I could do, I had to give up. All those hours spent getting to this point wasted. Wasted, because Surtr has no LIPS.

Heres some more proof that I completed every single step up until the lips.

Unfortunatly, Because I could not get a face rig to work no matter what I did, there are no blend shapes. I do deeply appologise, it wasnt supposed to be this way.

I tried my best to make sure every joint was moved in 4 directions to give a full demonstration of the deformation. This was a long process animating every joint in every possible rotation but luckily I didnt run into any problems this time, which is unsual for me, but ill take it.

Surtr wouldn't be complete without his signature weapon the Twilight Sword. So I took some time to make it for him. This weapon was inspired from the references for Assignment 1. It needed to look sharp and demoinc, as the blade is forged in the deepest depths of Muspelhiem.
As for textures, The blade will be made of molten fire and and flame, with a volcanic rock hilt and guard.
A mighty weapon for a mighty giant.

Here is the low poly sword and hilt.

Here is the combined sword and then a smooth applied to it.

Wire frame of low poly and smoothed.

UV maps for HIlt and Blade

Here is the fully Textured Hilt. Unfortuantly the file for the Blade corrupted before I could get screen shots, luckily I was able to export the textures before that happened.

The Twilight Sword, fully textured. Well almost.. For some reason Maya would not let me import the Metallic Roughness and Normal maps into the material, even though they were saved and imported in the exact same way as everyhing else I've done so far.

Whenever I tried I got this error message:

// Warning: The selected color space does not match the Input Color Space Rules set in your preferences. To avoid changing the color space if the rules are reapplied, turn on 'Ignore Color Space File Rules' for this file. // 

I tried searching online for a solution but could only find one other person with the problem and no one had replied with a fix. With no time left to try solve It I moved onto the final renders. Since the base colour and Emissive were fucntional I was still happy with the look of the blade.

The first step in the in the final rendering process it to set up my scene so I can show off my model.

I first made a 'Studio/Green Screen' style backdrop to give my scene some solid ground so that Surtr wasn't 

floating in space.

I then added 3 lights, a top, left and right side. and had them all facing inwards

I then took a few practice renders and tweaked the settings of each light until I was happy with them. This involved increasing the sampling to get nicer shadows,  increasing the intensity, and adding some soft colour to the side lights to give the scene more character.

Final set up of the scene before renders.
I just need to choose a colour for the backdrop, I will find one that feels right as I take some renders.

I ran though a few poses in real life holding a sword to try get a feel for how I want Surtr to stand, I wanted him to feel imposing and menacing but in a way that wasnt agression. A pose that had a pressence about it.

I had a play around posing Surtr in some of the 6 poses above, I ended up chosing the bottom middle pose as I felt it fit his character the most and helped show off many aspects of the model

"Your end, is Inevitable...." - Surtr

I'm very happy with how these turned out, The lighting made the model look so much better then in Assignment one, I couldnt figure out how to make hte lights work properly and turns out all I needed to do was un-tick the Normalise button and it fixed everything.

I chose yellow and orange side lights so that the glow helped highlight the fire and flame on Sutr's textures. The backdrop was also a faded orange, this was to simulate the firey depths of Muslpelhiem but still keep a professional studio lighting feel.

Heres some bonus renders with some different poses:

The Samuari Defense Pose.
While I do really like the shapes this pose creates, it doesnt feel like a stance that Surtr would take. Since he a being of unrivaled power, enough to end the 9 realms, the thought of him taking a defensive stance just didnt feel right.

The "You're Next" Pose.
This pose was nearly the one I went with for the turn around but when I reflected on who Surtr is it didnt feel right to have him pointing, as if calling out an invidividual. Surtr is a primal force, that destroys all indiscriminately all shall fall equally before his might.

The "No one can stop me!" Pose.
I felt this pose was a little too emotionally charged to fit Surtrs character, which is why I didnt chose it for the main one. I do wish the face rig worked so I could have had his mouth open yelling, I think it would have added a lot to the shot.

The Eternal Guardian Pose.
I love the energy of this pose, Surtr patiently waits for someone to step to him, before cutting them down in one fell swoop.

While it feels imposing, it still doesnt fit the narrative I have constructed for the character. Surtr is never still, he spends all eternity forging his blade and then when it is done, assumes his demonic form and ends the universe. There is no time for him to wait patiently. 

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Final thoughts:

This project was a huge undertaking, while I had touched on a lot of the techniques needed to produce a full character I hadn't done them all in one go from start to finish following the full production pipeline. Since I had a bit of experience already I really tried to push myself to create a character I could really be proud of instead of making a really good simple character. 

I accomplished my goal, Sutur is the best model I have made to date and while definitly not perfect, considering where I was at the start of this course I couldn't be happier with it.

Now, whenever I need to create a character I can do the whole process without getting stuck, provided all the programs dont bug out on me. I certainly underestimed some areas of production like retopologising, but I pushed through all the pain that went into solving the endless problems I had and managed to complete something I feel proud to show off.

Surtr looks DOPE as hell & I hope others feel the same.

P.S. I know this probably isn't a 7 but I really tried for one so I could have the chance to get my model 3D printed. Is it at all possible to make that happen? Or is it strictly 7's only?
I'd be more than happy to fix/alter areas of the model if it needed some for printing purposes.