Rigging

This post is probably long overdue, but I am writing this to declare that I shall be looking to advance my rigging skills for the Advanced Skills unit.  I have chosen Rigging, as I have a basic working knowledge of rigging, probably more experienced than a fair amount of people in my year, but at that, it isn't very extensive.

In order to improve my rigging, I have made use of a tutorial on character rigging from Digital-Tutors.com.  This tutorial covered all the important areas of rigging including, Locators, setting up joints, parenting, different forms of constraints, IK handles and IK/FK switches.  After doing this tutorial, I have developed skills such as creating controllers for certain joints, as well as putting in locators and putting joints in the hands.  I had previously struggled with putting joints in the hands.

Here is an image of a rig that I fitted into this model.  It has colour co-ordinated controls for the Right and Left side of the rig, controllers made from curves for the hips, chest and neck; and I have also used the Set Driven Key option to establish some clenching in the fists as well as Ball and Toe curls in the feet.

When I bind this rig to the skin of the model, you will see that it mostly moves correctly, when I move certain controllers.

However, there is a fairly major problem with the right arm; when I move the chest controller, the right arm, and part of the surrounding area, starts to break apart and drastically alters the shape of the model.

I have been trying to figure out if it was anything to do with how I constrained the joints and controllers using Point and Parent constraints.  I had some difficulty trying to remember the correct use, particularly when constraining the wrist curve to the hand controller.  I may have to rebuild this arm's joints and controllers entirely from scratch and pay better attention to the video tutorial, before I can move on to the next stage, which will be painting the weights.

Once I feel confident with following the steps in this tutorial, I will try and apply what I have learnt to another model, hopefully one from a project that I am working on to build my portfolio, but if not, I will find one on the internet.