making some lil fellas

Knowing that I'll need to figure out animated 2D textures for the face of this model later on, I watched  this video  and the creator's next two videos in the series. She works in Blender but watching her process of modelling, rigging, animating and texturing was still really helpful to me. Unfortunately it's also made me not really like how my model is looking.  Her cutesy, chibi-like style really works nicely with the low-poly modelling. She's actually also more liberal in her poly count than I've been, making me think I should probably up my poly count, especially given that my model will probably be more complex than hers. I don't really want to backtrack again... but I also don't want to follow through with a project I'm not happy with and possibly give myself problems later on (with regards to the low poly count potentially creating issues with animating). I'm considering attempting again to simplify the character style - utilising noodle arms ...

I am going to redo the rig This blog post is confusing because I am confused. 16/12/25 I'm having some trouble mirroring my skin weights. I think it might be that some of the vertices aren't attributed to the joints identically on both sides? Actually, using the component editor to look at the locations of each vertex compared to its mirrored vertex, it appears that they're not actually perfectly mirrored in most spots. I wonder if I accidentally shifted half of the mesh in between steps.  I also seem to have accidentally locked the upper half of the controllers. At this point I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to just redo the rigging stage with the knowledge that I have now and the slightly altered mesh. I would simply delete the current mesh, delete half of the mesh to re-mirror it, delete the mesh history, then re-rig it. I'll go through the entire rigging process without backtracking this time. If I want to adjust the mesh after the fact, it'll be bet...

6/12/25 Before continuing with rigging, I adjusted the head slightly to be smaller. I felt it was a little too big and had gotten some comments from others on it as well. Also I was looking at some 3D character models from other stylised games and liked their more proportional head sizes. I think this works better with the honestly quite anatomical form of the body. I also put the rig objects into a layer so that I could hide them while adjusting the mesh. Hand Joints In the Human IK window, I switched to the "Definition" menu and unlocked it. This puts the model in a t pose and lets me assign joints to the HIK. To make the finger joints, I'm just using the "Create Joints" tool, with "Projected Centering" toggled on in the tool settings. Remember to name them correctly in the Outliner. I adjusted them a little, making sure to check the orthographic views as well. The Projected Centering is quite accurate though, so the adjustments were very minor.  I m...

Some notes on this next step, following my research: When quick rigging, the default embed method (Imperfect Mesh) may not be the best option for me, as it's designed to work around more standard character meshes with more facial details that include interior geometry (i.e. eye sockets, mouths, nostrils, ear holes). The model I've created doesn't have any of these details. I'm not sure if it will be necessary/beneficial to use the more simple embed methods or if the Imperfect Mesh method will still work fine. Will experiment with this. When following the two tutorials by  Maya Learning Channel, I believe can pause my progress on the first part before I get to the skinning step, create and link the joints for the hands and feet, then skin everything. This avoids me having to reskin things. I'll probably have most of the model be highly skin weighted since it's low poly. The rigidity would look better and too much skin movement would probably look really disturbin...

       Tools Select                                   q Move                                     w Rotate                                   e Scale                                     r   Repeat Previous Tool                  g  Activate incremental snapping      hold j Snap to grid                          x  Snap to curve or edge              c Snap t...

  > Never use Maya Binary, always  Maya ASCII!  <  It's easier to fix ASCII.      Navigation Rotate view                            alt +  left click Pan view                                alt +  middle click Truck (not Zoom)                        alt +  right click,  or  scroll Toggle Four View/change view       press spacebar Hotbox menu                            hold spacebar                                          then click and hold a menu Focus  ...