making some lil fellas

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  ...

    Maya Technical Notes Set Up and Navigation Modelling

General Project and Blog Update 26/11/25: I took about a week long break from this project (somewhat unintended). I found myself a bit busier than I expected with events to go to and some more focus on other projects (namely my zine). I also didn't really want to get started on the next step because I knew I'd have to learn a bunch of new stuff :(. But I have done all the learning I need to get started now! With regards to how I'm organising this blog (very much still figuring this out), I will try to make blog posts with general tips and shortcuts for different areas of the process, tagged "Technical Notes". These will be cleaner than my other posts, intended to be quick guides for me (or others) to look at as a refresher. I'll format them similarly to  my old Maya Tips list . I found that this old post was a bit difficult to navigate and had too much information which is why I'm wanting to split them up now. I'll likely have a post for: Basics/Setup/...

I found these two beginner YouTube tutorials that go over the basics of rigging and setting up a character rig: Basics of rigging  by Academic Phoenix Plus Quick rigging and skinning  by Maya Learning Channel Adding hand joints to the quick rig  by Maya Learning Channel The first video is effective in teaching the very basics of rigging and is very thorough in its explanations. The other two videos give a step-by-step on how to rig a character (using Maya's quick rig as a base) which I will probably follow quite closely. The last video also details how to save skin weights which will be useful if (more likely when) I need to adjust the mesh. Notes from Tutorials: FK = forward kinematics IK = inverse kinematics Switch from the  Modeling menu set to Rigging     Joints Skeleton > Create Joints > Tool Settings      A joint's radius is scaled to its length but they can be made consistent in the settings by making the " Short bone radiu...

I started by sketching out some very rough poses as a warm-up (and to motivate myself to get started by putting something on the page), then I copied the body styles from my reference page, focusing just on the forms of the bodies. This really helped me better identify the similarities and differences between these styles. All these styles have heads that are around the same width as the shoulders so I'll likely stick with that. The limbs and face details are where these styles differ the most.  I continued to draw some different poses using similar proportions as the references, playing around mostly with the sharpness and definition. I realised while working on this, that this is good practice for my 2D art skills as well, since I tend to struggle with stylisation. This is something that I always intend to practice and study more.  I also realised that I can only figure out so much through 2D sketches and I might actually be able to work through a lot more variation through ...