Week Eight: Rigging, tools, and more rigging!

The model for the main character(Kana) has finally been retopologized and ok'd for rigging! In the interest of time, the bulk of the body will be rigged via Advanced Skeleton. However, the hands and face will be rigged by hand. The default hands from the autorig don't allow the animators enough articulation, so they requested I rebuild them with metacarpal and spread controls. The facial autorig with Advanced Skeleton doesn't easily allow the range of expressions we'll want, so I'll be rigging the face by hand as well.

Before I had a chance to start rigging, though, I created a tool that has helped in skinweighting immensely. 

For those not in the know: Skinweighting a character lets you determine how much influence a joint has over the mesh of the character. You can set keys on the controls to move your character as you're skinweighting, so you can see and fix any problem areas that might arise during actual animation. 

Setting a bunch of keyframes for every control is kind of tedious, so I built a tool that would do that for me. It's purely a tool for riggers, but I've become fond of it. :) 

It works on each control selected in the order they were selected. You can choose the degree of rotation of each control, and how many frames apart you want to set the keys. 

The rigged model is in the process of being skinweighted properly, but I passed a rough version off to the animators to have fun with. Here's just one pose out of many we've had fun with: