3rd week, I say bap, slip me some skin maaan.

The first thing I wanted to do this week was to get the back, arm, leg and tail fur attached and then get some quick & basic skinning done so I could pass the rig over to our animators Roy, Oddne and Emma to play with. Below is the topology changes that have taken place with bap as a result of adding the fur to him and also a few minor general topology changes. The 3 and 5 point star rule was particulary useful in achieving the desired topology. It helped me to reduce any unnecessary topology to keep my character as low poly as possible, while maintaining smooth deformations in all the key areas. The use of reference of anatomy of various animals that share similar characteristics to bap where also useful in creating good deformations.

 I then proceeded to work on the worst of the weighting and fix it up as quickly as possible. The video below pritty much sums up the majority of the first pass at weighting the rig, with a little aniamtion demo at the end of the video showing all the joints being animated real quick.



 Overall at this stage I was happy with the progress and I decided to hand the rigs over to the animators for a proper test. Below are some videos that feature some basic animation tests by Roy Nottage, Oddne Madsen and Emma Taylor.

Walk cycle test by: Roy Nottage



3 Jump tests by: Emma Taylor







There were a few rigging elements that Emma mentioned would be good to add in, such as bum controls similar to that of shoulder controls and the tail control needed to be simplified to stop double transformations occuring with rotations and the spine controls needed to be organised to allow for front and back control of the character. These features will be addressed and added to the rig in the following posts.

To round up here are a few stills of the model and rig all tidied up with fur on board now and modelling in wireframe and little preview of the uv's. See stills below.