Hey! Happy Groundhog Day! I’m not really sure I care if the groundhog sees his shadow. The weather is so messed up I don’t think his shadow is going to make much difference if we get an early Spring or not. Mother Nature will do what she wants.
Yay! I finished the rig for Sticks. Well, sort of. I’ll get to that in a moment. I was so glad to finish building the rig. I did want to scream though. Remember that problem I was having with the arms when scaling the global control? It’s what prompted me to start the rig over. Well, it gets fixed in the rig clean up step. Talk about annoying. It wasn’t the easiest thing though. I had some trouble getting the helpers just right. I had to do some weird finagling to get them to not flip out on me.
So here’s how it looks, just the bones, all done up. And also a picture of the rig next to the mesh. Kind of cool I think. 
Here’s a view of the finger rig that was one of the last steps. I didn’t have as many bones to deal with since Sticks doesn’t really have fingers. But I do want to be able to bend the hand like he does have them so I used fewer joints. I ran into a little issue with the control for the 
thumb. One of them, because of the way it’s oriented and because of how Sticks is designed, the control was buried in the mesh and I couldn’t click on it to manipulate it. So you can see here the original layout of the finger and thumb control and then where I just adjusted the placement of the control so I can get to it.
After the rig is built, the next step is to skin or envelope it to the mesh. Or is that the mesh to the rig? Either way the process involves selecting the mesh, applying a skin modifier to it and then adding the bones from the rig that you want to impact the behavior of the mesh. Here you can see the modifier panel for it. There’s way more too it. This is just the modifier and the list of bones.
Enveloping the mesh and rig isn’t the end. Some strange things can happen with the process and you can have a head bone having influence over a vertex on the foot. This can cause pulling and stretching. Also the mesh will deform, like our skin does, when the rig is moved or posed and that too can cause stretching and pulling, some of which is very ugly. Here is a close up of an example of some of what happens. So this now has to get cleaned up.
The part where the bones from the rig impact the vertices on the mesh is basically called weighting. There is probably some better more technical term for it but 
that’s what I’m going to use. So what happens is the different bones have influence over different vertices. Some make perfect sense, the head bone will influence the head mesh. The last index finger bone will influence the vertices of the end of the index finger, but also some of the vertices of the index finger that are a little closer to the hand. Then there are the weird ones where the head bone might influence a vertex on a foot or a right foot bone might influence a left foot vertex. During the weighting, or re-weighting process you go in and adjust the amount of influence a particular bone has over the vertices. Here’s what it looks like when in that mode.
To help with the process of weighting it’s best to set some key frames and then pose your character so you can scrub back and forth from a neutral pose, where everything looks fine, into a more action pose where it might not look fine. The goal is for the mesh to
look nice and smooth in any pose. Here are a few poses for you to enjoy.
You may notice, in the poses where his arms are at his sides or on his hips that his wrists look odd. That’s where I made a mistake with my weighting. I will have to go back in and fix that. I had something all messed up and in trying to fix it, I messed it up even more. I ended up assigning all the wrist vertices to only the hand bone and so when his hands are down, gravity takes over and since there is no influence from any of the arm bones there is nothing to tell the wrist how to hold it’s shape. I was a little frustrated and distressed at the prospect of trying to fix this until I remembered that I may have a way to get back those weight settings from before I messed it up. There was a step, where in showing how to fix something else, the tutorial has you save the envelope weights and then reload them. I believe I still have that file. I should be able to remove and then reapply the weights. It was part way through the process so I will have more to re-do than just the wrists but I think it will actually be easier. I’m going to try it.
You might have noticed the different colors and materials that I applied to Sticks, in the different poses. I had him in a base pink while I was working on the rig just to make him easier to see and see through. I like the dark sort of composite look but I thinks it’s too dark to really show personality so for now I’m going to go with the grey matte look with the blue reflective highlights. It’s much friendlier looking.
Of course, even with the wrist issue, I was and am very excited to have the rig done. I had to see how he is going to look as I make him move so I created this very short, as in don’t blink or you will miss it, animation. It’s just a test to see how it looks.
This is by no means the last you will be seeing or hearing of Sticks. I have at least one still image to setup and capture of him right away. After that, I have an animation in mind that I want to use him for so I will be working on that. I need to find some good reference on creating walk cycles and then maybe how to embed it in the character. It seems that should be possible. To setup a walk cycle so then I can set him on a path to walk along instead of have to animate every step. But I may have to do that for the first animation.
Sticks is going to need some friends to hang out with so I’ll be getting back to some modeling again. After getting this far with Sticks I’m thinking the Alien is going to need to be re-modeled with the express purpose of animating it. I’ve got a few other characters in mind as well. It should be fun.
I’ll also be getting back to more greeting card designs. I have an idea for an Easter type card but I think that’s a coming up a bit sooner than I’ll have it created. There’s also Graduation season coming up. I think I can have something, for that put together so I’ll probably start on that next. Yes, I know that Valentine’s Day is before both of those but really, if I can’t get Easter done in time I’m not likely to have Valentines done, at least not for this year. Maybe for next year.
As you can tell there is lots to do already and now I’m looking at adding learning Maya into the mix. I know I wrote that I’d try to get a post up on the why I’m thinking I need to learn Maya and the Maya versus 3DS Max thing. I spent all my time last week focused on completing the rig for Sticks so that didn’t happen. I still think that will be a good post, though I may want to get into a few tutorials before I write it. I did go ahead and purchase a couple of those books on rigging in Maya. One in particular looks like a good general resource since it tries to cover good practices and theory. I figure the theory and practices should transfer to whatever program I’m using even if some of the specifics don’t.
That’s all the excitement for this update. My immediate plans are to fix Sticks’ wrists and get that pose created. Oh, and get to work on the Graduation card. As always, check back again to see if my plans and reality managed to intersect.