Rigging

This post is a little late but I've been busy with other stuff lately.  Here, I shall talk about the rigging of Cornelius.

I have done several character riggings over the course of my degree and I find that I have become very proficient at it.  I managed to rig Cornelius largely without any tutorials to guide me, and I applied a Smooth bind to his skin.  I had previously been used to working only with Rigid binds but I discovered that with Smooth binds, I could have more control over the influence that each joint had, avoiding any further problems.

I also put some joints in his hands and fingers, as these will be important for 2 of the poses that I am considering.

During the rigging process, I discovered a problem with Cornelius' feet, in particular his inner toes, they were joined together by the vertices!

This meant that I had to delete the some of the faces in both of the offending toes and then create polgon faces and extruding them to make new toes from scratch.  I had to make sure these toes were not close to one another.

The new toes looked far cruder than the previous but they caused less problems.  I simply went around the joints in each leg with the Paint Weights tool to control the influence that each joint has on the geometry.

I did the same in the gorilla's arms and hands.

I also discovered that when I turned Cornelius' head, the top half would move further than the bottom half, creating a distorted effect, meaning I had to increase the influence of the head and neck joints, and decrease the influence from the chest.

I then went through the back joints and increased or decreased the influence to make sure his bending down is smooth.

The next stage is to set some driver keys for his face and possibly his hands.