Redoing the Rig (needlessly, perhaps)

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 better to have the rigging, and more importantly, the skin weighting fully done first as the skin weights can be saved in a separate file and then put back onto a model after the fact. 

The main hassle is that creating and connecting the finger joints is quite time consuming. I'm wondering if there's a way to preserve that work that I've done. 

I've moved the left hand joints to a new group in the Outliner and deleted the rig. This is in file name: body.020

The quick rig tool isn't working as smoothly as it was before and I'm not sure why. I'm following the same steps :/.

- This was because I had to create a new character in the Quick Rig menu first. 

The re-rig is in file name: body.021

Reusing the same hand joints is proving to be very difficult because they're still linked to the previous rig and HIK, and I'm not sure how to unlink them. They're also not mirroring cleanly. I may just need to remake them :(.

I've remade the finger joints, mirrored them, and placed the finger joints into the quick rig character guide. [This was incorrect]

The quick rig has slightly bent knees by default but the way I had the legs modelled were very straight. This is something to keep in mind when making character models in the future - a slight bend in the knees is standard anyway. For this model I've adjusted the knee joints a little so that they're sitting further back and hopefully that'll work like normal. 

After skinning I encountered the same issue as before of the skin being too loosely bound and barely being connected to the mesh. I didn't have this issue the first time I briefly tested the quick rig tool and so I'm wondering if the addition of hand joints have been messing with the quick rig's automatic skin weighting. I tried looking into the bind skin settings but I haven't found/figured out anything that helps. 

I decided I'd try rigging and skinning it on an older file, without the hand joints added. I'll then save and import the skin weight from that onto my main file. 

When doing this, I noticed that my main file has two sets of the body in the skin weight painting menu, rather than just one. I think this is because of the finger joints in the character guides hierarchy. And the fact that the skin weights are being split between these two hierarchies is messing with the weights. Rewatching the quick rig + finger joints tutorial, I've realised that he actually places the finger joints into the QuickRigCharacter_Reference, not the guides. [This was me realising my previous mistake]. Moving the joints should fix my issue...

Huzzah! It works.

Next Steps and Reflection (cope)

I will still need to make some slight adjustments to the skin weights but much less than I would have had to before. This should be pretty straight-forward and then I can finally move on to animating. 

I wasted a lot of time going back and forth and continuing on without figuring out root issues, but at least I learnt more about skin weight painting methods and familiarised myself better with the different rigging steps, settings, and object locations. 

I may manage to finish the skin weighting in the next two weeks but obviously with the holiday season in full approaching, it might not be until three weeks from now that I continue. 

I would really like to get some practice in with hard surface modelling and rigging/animating multiple objects (i.e. hair and clothes). It could also be good practice to try rigging non-human and non-organic models with moving parts to give me a better understanding on how to set up joints.

Hopefully I have time to get onto that as well before the summer break ends.