The rapid ideation session ends in 1 hour roughly. Unfortunately, my Curupira project has hit critical block and I am encountering a technical issue that I do not yet have the skills to troubleshoot. These issues all concern the rigging (Blender, 2021).
Firstly, my blender file always displays this disconcerting error message when I open it.
Through Lile’s tutorial (Lile, D., 2020), I discovered a new feature for generating all of the controls, which can be used to move the character. I thought this was really neat, as in the past when I was using Maya, I would need to make these from scratch.
Unfortunately, the issues arise when I attempt to bind the joints to the model. As per Lile’s tutorial, I select the rig with controls and then the model and I attempt to parent these.
I first attempted this using ‘Automatic weights’, but this did not make the model move with the rig. I also got an error message stating that it could not assign parts of the model to some of the joints… it did not say which joints though.
I then tried with Envelope Weights, but this had sort of the opposite effect.
I also tried armature deform with Empty Groups and this had no effect.
I did some research online into what the issue may have caused this (bones, h., Clary, G. and Aitken, M., 2015). Initially, I thought it may have been duplicated or overlapping vertices but I did ensure that all duplicated or overlapping vertices were deleted from the model. Another possible reason could be down to the belt and when I merged the belt with the Curupira model, it must have created some sort of conflict in the topology,
In hindsight, I probably should not have modelled the belt separately but instead I should have created it by exturding faces from the Curupira’s waist. I could potentially go back to an earlier version of the Curupira and do this, but it would mean that I will need to do UV mapping and some of the texturing, as well as his hair again.
Additionally, I have found that using the particles system to create his hair now means that the model moves very slowly if I attempt to transform, scale or rotate it. This may even be why the file is so big. I would need to go back and perhaps model his hair from scratch instead.
I am somewhat disappointed at this point that I made so much progress with this character only for the project to be ground to a halt by unforeseen technical issues in the last two days. I now have the benefit of hindsight so I can attempt to resolve these issues and use what I learnt when making future character models, so I can attempt to resolve these in my own time, but for this rapid ideation, I have done all I can.
I will be writing a further post to close off this rapid ideation session and to review it as a whole, as well as to what extent I met the goal I set for myself, as well as the original requirements of the hackathon theme. While I do feel a bit of disappointment, I do need to recognise that I have gained a lot and I have developed during the course of this rapid ideation session so I need to analyse this so it can benefit me for the remainder of this course.
References
Blender Foundation. 2021. Blender (2021). [Software]
bones, h., Clary, G. and Aitken, M., 2015. heat weighting: failed to find solution for one or more bones. [online] Blender Stack Exchange. Available at: <https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/15964/heat-weighting-failed-to-find-solution-for-one-or-more-bones> [Accessed 24 March 2021].
Lile, D., 2020. Blender 2.8 Character Creation | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com. [online] LinkedIn Learning. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/blender-2-8-character-creation/ [Accessed 24 March 2021].
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