Rigging - Hand Joints and Beginning Skin Weighting
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 mirrored the joints to the other hand then placed them under the hand joints in the Outliner.
I then assigned them to the joints in the HIK display. I did this by selecting a joint in the Outliner, then right clicking the corresponding joint on the HIK display and clicking "Assign Selected Bone".
I got confused when connecting the finger joints to the hand because they disappear when put under the hand joint. I tried clicking some settings and stuff and accidentally just re-rigged it all wrong and got Maya to crash :(. I will now have to redo the finger joints. I should've saved as soon as I had finished creating the finger joints.
Once I'd gotten to the same stage as before, I just ignored the fact that I couldn't see the finger joints and followed through with the steps. Once I clicked "Create Control Rig", it all turned out fine.
I've got the hand joints in now and the controllers are working. The fingers look ugly when bent though. Next, I will try adjusting the skin weights and see if that is enough to get the fingers bending nicely.
I'm not sure if I should create more joints at the feet as well. If anything, I'd probably only need to add one joint there but I'm not sure if that works with the HIK. Because I'll be giving this model shoes later on, the foot movement should be fairly stiff.
Skin Weighting
I think the default skin weights got messed around quite a bit through all the back and forth (I think it was from deleting history at some point..) I was doing between steps. This means I really have to go through and do all the skin weighting manually.
11/12/25
I did some rough skin weight painting based on how I think it should look but I obviously missed a lot of spots...
After looking into forums and tutorials, I'm realising I should definitely be using the flood tool more.
When right clicking with the Skin Weight Painting tool, you can select between "paint" and "select" mode. With vertices selected, you can "Flood" them to paint them at full opacity.
It is sometimes nicer to just switch to the selection tool and then back to the paint tool though. This can be a little annoying because I need to make sure I'm in the right selection mode so that I'm not selecting the rig/controllers.
I've also toggled on the "Color Ramp" to make the join weights a little clearer.
The Component Editor is also something that can be used.
Windows > General Editors > Component Editor > Smooth Skins
With this, you can select vertices and adjust the weights in the table.
I'm finding that I'm just having to paint the weights on full weight in order to avoid any kind of distortion and then I'll smooth them out to make them less rigid. I'm not sure if this is correct though.
body_adjustment.015.012 (I accidentally updated over this a little though)
Some of the weighting, especially around the legs, need to be smoothed out. I will continue with this another day.
Next Steps:
I'll have to smooth out the skin weights and go back and forth between testing the joint movements and painting the weights. After that, I'll be able to move onto animating.
These steps have taken longer than I expected. I'm not holding myself to posting weekly blogs, more posting blogs for each chunk of work/learning. I'm posting this partway through the process of doing the skin weights because it's been a while since I've posted any progress and I've actually done a decent amount haha.
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