Rigging 'Gin'

February 16, 2022

Rigging 'Gin'

Rigging Gin required me to expand on my use of 'Quickrig' by implementing finger and eye controls as well as blend shapes for expressions.

I started with some minor edits on my model character, shortening the sleeves to avoid geometry collisions.

I also changed the position of Gin's ponytail, as I didn't want to use dynamic joints here anymore. Instead, I planned to skin the ponytail to the spine.

I edited the skin colour map to give her black sleeves under her robe.

Next, I generated a skeleton using the 'Quickrig' tool.

I broke the automatic skinning and added finger joints. Then, I reskinned the character.

I learnt new things about 'Quickrig' during this process. One being the importance of Posing your character. I had to re-skin my characters shoulders in order to achieve a clean T pose.

I added to my skinning by giving the characters robe some influence over the upper legs. Therefore, her robe moves with her legs as she walks. This means she can now sit and bend down.

Next, I attached an eye control to my rig. Using the 'aim' constraint to move the eyes either individually or as a pair.

At this stage, I was ready for blend shapes. However, I had combined my mesh at the start of the rigging process. I therefore had to break the skinning and separate the head from the body before quickly reskinning using a file backup and the 'copy skin weights' tool.

I then set created a series of blend shaped for eyebrow, eyelid and mouth movement. Luckily, expressions are kept simple in my PreViz, so I didn't need too many blendshapes. I created expressions for the left and right side of the face separately using the 'wrap' deformer.

Once the blend shapes were attached, I was able to control Gin's expressions.

I have yet to decide what to do with the characters ponytail. I'm currently not able to skin it to the body because it is now separate geometry. I will work around this problem when required during animation.