Rigging and Posing

The actual rigging part was not as tedious and scary as I imagined it being. After watching the Youtube and Onedrive tutorials a couple of times, the whole thing went quite smoothly. The fingers were comparatively harder to do, as the skeleton was quite big for the hand I had. I also had an issue with the rotation tool. It was far too big and only turned in one direction. For that reason, the thumb ended up moving sideways, instead of towards the palm. If I were to do this again I would have paid more attention to the thumb but for now, I will have to get around that when posing my character.

For a first attempt, I would say that the rig turned out fairly good. The face was always going to be an issue, but luckily the weight paint tool was very easy to use. The hair and scarf still had some distortion when turning the head, so I made sure they were all covered too. The skirt portion was where the distortion was at its worst. I wasn't sure how to fix it at first, but after fixing the face rotation I figured, I could try applying the weight paint tool to that area. Unfortunately, this would limit the leg movements a bit, but since I can't envision this character doing high kick poses, this should not be too problematic. I noticed while painting and trying out the movement that the rig classified the skirt portion as part of my character's right leg. This would mean that if I wanted the skirt to move I would need to put all of the weight on the left leg and make sure it does not clip. Although, the skirt glitches if I move the right leg too much, so I will need to rely on the left one for more extreme movement. Another area where I had to compromise was the vest. If I moved the arms the shoulder portion would stretch, but putting weights on it made them naturally stay suspended in the air. I kept them as is, but I'll need to figure out how to make it less noticeable with the poses I'll create. All in all, this was probably one of the least stressful parts of working on this project. Part of it could boil down to knowing the software better and being so close to the end. Ultimately, I am very excited to see how my model looks posed under lighting.