The hunters claw kept growing and so the T5000 was born.

Well at this point I thought I would be laying out and rigging the plants for the missile fly by scene as well as the particles for the missile trail and then doing the texture for Bap, but there were some problems that simon needed me to fix on the hunter so I put the fly by scene on hold and picked up the hunter and started my fixing.

The first problem that I encountered was what me and matt l described as a T5000 like spear which seemed to be coming out of the hunters right arm. I was quite familier with this kind of problem from when I was weighting Bap. It occurs when verticies have no weights assigned to them. Below shows the first of many problems I encountered with the rig.

A few clicks here a few clicks there and the problem was solved, well I pritty much re-weighted both hands properly to be safe, making sure each joint deformed as it would on a real hand using my own hand as reference was particulary useful.

After the T5000 issue had been fixed there was a few other issues that simon asked me to fix so I got to it. The first of which being the neck weighting when the hunter rotates his neck the collar would go through the coat. To fix this I started by weighting the collar to follow the neck joint correctly. I then secondly started weighting the coat easing the strength of the weighting in but only to a value that would subtly effect the coats geometry and so that the collar would not pass through the coat. I was able to account for this up to about a 45% rotation but any further and the collar would pass through. This could not be fixed easily without re-topologizing the collar and coat top to allow for better deformations. As we didn't have time for this we just left it at a compromise of sacraficed rotation for the hunters neck which wasn't a massive problem as he wasn't really doing any 90% turns with his head like a owl so that was ok.

The next problem was his coat around his gluteus maximus, his trowser's kept coming through his coat and his groyne had very weird and dodgy deformation. With a bit of prancing around the studio raising my legs unnecessarily high, to get a feel for what muscles and clothing are influenced by the various joints of the body I managed to iron out the kinks.

Below shows the lower coat and groyne fix and well as a quick look back at the re weighting of the fingers.

The last real fix I had to do was weighting the feet which for some reason kept messing up when the animators got hold of it, but the second attempt seemed to iron out all the problems. Below shows the breakdown of the weighting for the lower leg joints.

After all the fixes had been done simon asked me if the mostache of the hunter could be rigging so to stop it going through his face during facial animation. I did this portion of rigging between starting the texturing of bap and building the missile fly by scene so its kind of a pre emptive post so to keep all the hunter rigging and fixes in one post.

For this I just made a basic fk control system attached to the main rig neck joint so when the head rotates the mostache would follow correctly and could also easily be animated by the simple fk controls see above.

In the next post Il cover Baps texturing and the start of the infamous missile fly by scene.