CAPTAIN ATOM SMASH!

It works...sorta.

3D Rigging Systems: Wk12-Final Skinning and weights painting

Skinning a rig to a mesh is the process of binding the skeleton under the mesh or skin to actually influence and control the mesh's position, effectively animating the mesh. this is a fairly simple process and requires that one simply select the join hierarchy the mesh together and conduct a smooth bind operation which also applies a set of basic skin weights.

Painting weights, as it turns out, is one of the most pain staking and frustrating processes I have yet to encounter in 3D modelling and pips UVing at the post in this regard. The reason for my disdain is the fact that the entire process feels so imprecise and each action taken to correct one issue then creates more issues elsewhere. Its an unfortunate case of one step forward, two steps back. Skin weighting is essentially granting influence to certain certain joints over vertices on the mesh. It is similar in a sense to blend shapes except that it is far more complicated. In essence each joint must have total control over its own area of the mesh as well as a smooth decrease in influence away from the area as to not create sheer drop off points that look unnatural and ugly, on the other hand having too much of a smooth gradient will result in either insufficient influence over certain areas or over influence in areas which it has no business influencing. It is a delicate balance and something that is never truly finished, only that you get to a point where it works well enough for your purposes.

3D Rigging Systems: Wk11 Blend Shapes

There are two main methods of doing facial rigging, the first is using bones and SDKs in a similar manner to the hand and makes for a far more dynamic rig, however you can also use Blend shapes to assign quick emotions or basic controls to a face, since that is what we are aiming for the blend shapes seems to be the logical choice. Blend shapes work by moving vertices between two points, one is the default model position and the the other is the maximum extreme of what ever control you are attempting to make, for example when getting the eye brow to move up and down using a blend shape, the extreme point would be the highest point the eyebrow can move to, the blend shape then assigns all points in-between on a slider accessible in the Animation editor window in Maya.

One issue with blend shapes however is that by default a blend shape has influence over all vertices in a mesh, this means that when getting multiple blend shapes to act simultaneously, for example opening the mouth and raising the eyebrow at the same time. One or both of the controls will bug out and either not work properly or cause some horrific geometrical errors in the mesh. To solve this issue there is a tool called the membership edit tool in Maya that allows the user to deselect certain vertices from a blend shape control, for example removing the influence of the eyebrow control from the vertices controlling the shape of the mouth and vice versa.