Skinning and finishing the character/final thoughts

  The next step of my rig was to skin the character model to the bones I had created. I did this by making sure all the bones lined up with the skin shape and used the bind skin tool. I had to make sure the max influence from the bones was set to two and to allow bind poses. This is gives the best automatic skinning effect.
  When I first skinned my character, I hit a few problems. These were down to the influence of the skinning not being so accurate. An example of this was when I dragged the right arm inwards or outwards, it would drag parts of the face mesh with it. This was breaking the model so I had to use the paint skin weights tool to sort this out.

  Because i'm not really familiar with the paint skin weights tool, I found this task very difficult and stuck with cleaning up the very obvious sections of mesh being damaged by the bones. I found that when I tried replacing the skin weights with the brush, as I dragged a bone outwards to test the influence, the mesh of the model would literally break and i'd have small tris from the mesh being dragged across the screen. Skinning weights is something I plan on working on in my own time to solve the issues I came across.
  Overall I created a functioning rig that could be used for simple animations. The rig is capable of being set into poses, can be used to create walk cycles and other small animations. With there being so much more possible with creating rigs, I feel this is an area I want to succeed in and will maintain practice at this area until I am fully confident in creating rigs.
  Since starting this module I have attempted creating rigs of my own. I started creating a rig for a scissor lift I modeled for another module. I was not completely successful with this, however I did gain a clearer understanding of the elements of rigging. I learnt about the importance of the heirachy in the outliner, and how to use the various types of constraints effectively. From creating the car rig, the best thing I learnt was how to use the expression editor. This was such a handy tool set to be taught and the possibilities for its uses are quite vast.
  After completing this module with my wider knowledge, I feel I could go back to the scissor lift rig I created and be confident enough to finish it off and make it fully functioning.