As you might have guessed I spent my time this week working on Sticks, again. I couldn’t leave the wrists as they were and once I latched on to the idea of using the saved weights file, I had to try it.
Loading the weights file worked as expected, except, apparently it was created after I messed up the left wrist. That was a little disappointing. However, it was created before I messed up the right side. So I decided to clean up the right side weighting for all of Sticks and then try mirroring the settings from right to left. This process has yet to work well for me. I couldn’t really get the mirror to work the first time I tried it last week and this time it didn’t seem to take either. At least, not at the wrists. So I kept clicking and managed to copy the settings from the right side to the left side. This mostly made a bigger mess. Mostly. It was a little helpful.
Copying the weight settings from right to left meant that I had copied the setting for the right side bones to left side vertices. This was helpful because I knew which of the left side bones I needed to add. It was also ugly. Really ugly. Since the bones from the right side were set to influence the vertices on the left they caused a lot of severe pulling and skewing. Fortunately, when I set about this test fix, I didn’t use my final file. Or what was my final file. I used an earlier version and saved that as a new file so it was a disaster all to itself. And. It turned out to be fairly easy to fix, if not a little time consuming. I just
selected a vertex and looked at the right side bones and then added the corresponding left side bones. Then I set all the right side bones to 0 and things straightened out pretty quickly.
I continued with the cleanup thinking that I might make this test fix file my new final file. However, at some point I decided I had enough information to just fix the wrists in my final file. Since I had already done the basic fix in the test file fixing my final file was relatively easy and comparatively quick. I made another test animation to show the fix and to put Sticks in a little different pose. It’s still really short so don’t blink.
I got really side tracked with creating the animation. When I made the final pose I ended up with some annoying flipping or snapping with the right hand. The turn of the hand from its starting point is a bit severe and I think that’s what caused it. Well, that, and using Auto Key. From the videos and tutorials I would say this is a case of gimble lock. Which means I managed to break whatever methods of mitigating it that were inherent in the rig or the process I followed didn’t have any gimble lock mitigation on the wrists. While trying to figure out how to fix it with extra key frames, that weren’t working, I remembered that I could use the curve editor to help clean up and smooth out some of the transitions. I’m not sure I elimintated the flipping completely. I was able to tone it down though. I think that may require smaller key frame sections when I try that again.
Of course my next step with Sticks is to get him worked into the art for SusanG 
Productions. Which, I have started. I imported the stage and scene around Sticks. At which point I found that he was a little to small to fit the scene. I was a little concerned, for a moment, that the scaling fix on the global control might not work. I am very happy to report that my concern was unfounded. It worked great. I was able to scale Sticks up, rotate him and place him where I needed him. I had to do a test pose so I could see how he looks.
I played around with fitting Sticks into the scene as it was laid out initially and it wasn’t working out. The text was too long to fit nicely in the view and be able to see Sticks. I rearranged the scene a little and moved Sticks over which helped a lot. I also toned down the background and the floor texture to take some busy-ness out of the scene. I’m still working on the background and floor coloring and deciding if I need special lighting, or even a camera view. Here’s where I’m at with it for the moment.
I’m excited to do more with Sticks and give him some companions. I have several companion characters in mind. And I think I might need to start prepping some media/advertising type art. I have at least two ideas for that already. First, I need to do some other work. I think it’s time to work on another card. I’ve mentioned an Easter card but once again, I’m getting a bit close to be able to do it justice. So I may look at other ideas. Maybe a Birthday card. That would be a nice addition to my Zazzle store.
You know what that means? You might get to see pictures of something other than Sticks next week.