It is now the last day of the rapid ideation session and I have spent yesterday and today doing rigging (Blender, 2021). I have to admit its been very hard to stick to this and fit it in with other commitments. I have managed to get very far into this project but there are still a lot of things I have yet to complete. I feel I have begun to rush many of the stages of the process in order to get as much of this as done, which probably is not good.
To set up the rig, Blender has a really good tool for creating ready-made humanoid rigs called Rigify. I used this to create the a basic rig for the Curupira. I then moved all of the joints around until they were in position with the Curupira. Lile’s tutorial (Lile, D., 2020) pointed out a tool that allows you to mirror the positioning of joints, but this did not seem to work for me so I had to do it all manually.
I also needed to tweak all of the joints in the face so that they matched up with his brows, nose, eyes and mouth.
Now that these are in place. The next step will be to add some controls so that I can change the pose of the character and then paint weights.
I may not be able to complete these stages before tonight’s webinar in which this rapid ideation session ends, but I will do what I can.
As this rig comes with joints for the face, I may need to remove the Blend Shapes task from my Kanban board, as controlling the face with joints may actually make this task redundant. I only added ‘Blend shapes’ as a task in the first place, as this was my understanding of how the animation for facial movements is created, based on when I used to use Maya around 8-9 years ago.
References
Blender Foundation. 2021. Blender (2021). [Software]
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 22 March 2021].