Character rigging for animation.

This stage was the most complex and problematic of them all. it took about 3 more weeks than I had planned and it was a case of trial and error all the way through. Character rigging involves building a virtual skeleton for the models to be attached to and then creating controls for these skeleton joints to be manipulated and animated. Sounds relatively straight forward....not so much.

I eventually got there with the rigging process, and then of course came the process of painting weights. this was a nightmare to be fair. It can be described as making sure each part of the body is deformed correctly by the right joints. In layman's terms this is making sure the right arm control doesn't distort the left knee! Not always so extreme but this is still a long and detailed process that provided many sleepless nights.

In the end  I decided against having ether character walking in the animation to eliminate the need to have a perfect weight distribution for a believable walk cycle. But the upper half of the bodies were not without their troubles.

I got there in the end...eventually!