Windbag Preliminary Rig Tests

Above is Ebil Windbag– Looks kinda Satanic o-0

Before moving on to unwrapping the body mesh of Windbag, I’m running some preliminary dry runs with a make shift rig – tweaking it ever so slightly to verify that the mesh will deform correctly and the character silhouette will remain intact.

What I have found so far is that:

• The arms when rigged in a T position greatly effect the shoulder area, pulling it out and widening the shoulders more than natural.



The stretching in the shoulder can either be painted out via weight painting – or I thought perhaps by moving the vertices of the arm into a more natural position before rigging?

I think it will depend on whether Windbag will raise his hands above his shoulders – I’d however like the freedom to account for this kind of movement, for animating later with him.

RIGGING THE HEAD

This rig is really tricky to place right for the head – it distorts it very easily.

HeadInfluence3 – finding most of the weighting if anchored to this influence is best for the head.

HAIR

I’m hoping to be able to create Windbag’s beard/moustache/eyebrows with a Maya Hair Plugin some time in the near future.

ARMOUR

Since his armour is quite rigid, I’m considering extracting it from the main mesh and overlaying it – then rigging each piece separate to it’s on controlling joint, and parenting these joints to the controls.

This will be done for the Shoulder/Knee Pads.

For all the ways that we’re the same: