Secondary Collaborative Project: 1 – 11 March 2021

2nd Collaborative Project

Back in February, Crystal invited me to join her project, but I was already in Emma’s team at that time. So, she asked if I have some free time to help her for character rigging work only.

I told her that I will let her know if I can join after the first meeting with Emma’s team to see the workload of the project. After the meeting, I informed Crystal that I can do the character rigging for her project.

I waited for Crystal to finish the character model first and last week on 27^th February, she sent me the final model of the character. I do a quick check on the model to see if there is any problem with it.

I then decided to do the rigging work for this whole week as fast as possible so I can get back to work on my primary group project.

1-10 Mar 2021

I started by preparing the model for the rigging. The file has some unnecessary objects like wall plane, lightings & camera, so I did some cleaned up and deleted those objects. I repositioned the character to the center grid and scaled it according to the real human size which is around 160 – 170 cm tall. I also renamed every object in the outliner properly so I can easily identify them when I do the rigging process later.

Next, I did some adjustments to the model topology and shapes so it can be rigged properly. Since Crystal mentioned that the character will be imported to a game engine, I did some optimisation by removing unnecessary segments on body parts which has too many polygons. I also changed some of the character shapes and poses like the mouth and hands, so they are symmetry and easier to rig.

Model optimisation

5-8 Mar 2021

I’m not very familiar with rigging in Maya when compared to 3dsmax and Blender. So before I proceed, I did some research and watched some tutorials on this matter. After several testing and learning, I decided to use Maya’s standard Human IK to rig the character instead of using the Advanced Skeleton plugin. I found several videos showing exporting to FBX for game engine is simpler with Human IK then with Advanced Skeleton where I need to change lot of things before it can be used in game engine. I’m not really sure, but don’t have much time to test everything as I need to finish this quickly so I can back to work on my primary group project.

Bone placement process

Skinning Process

Poses Test

It took me more than a week to do the whole process. I also did lots of testing and experiments while doing the rigging to better understand the Maya rigging which make the process longer. I actually did try to rig the face but I encountered some problems and not satisfied with it. So I sent the character rig without the facial controls first to Crystal for her to test.

Crystal was concerned about my works with my primary group project so she said she can do the facial rig. I suggested to her that if she want to do it, we can both do our own rig in case I fail to do mine, then she will have a character with facial controls.

Facial Bones and Controllers Setup

I proceed to finish the rig for the character face. I don’t use any plugin for the facial bones and controllers, but manually creating and placing them using the Maya standard ‘joints’ and ‘curve’ shapes. I watched several video tutorials for this and throughout the process, I can say that the concept of bone / ‘joint’ in Maya works quite different than 3dsmax and Blender. I’m not really sure how to describe it but in Maya, it treats bone as point and the connected line between each point is a visual to show its parent-child constrain. In other software, that connected line is actually a bone. I’m a bit struggle at first to understand the Maya joint especially the point’s orientation. After several try and errors I managed to grasp the concept although maybe not fully master it.