Introduction
This time I want to continue working on my collaborative project, and I want to learn rigging, so I will continue to use the Maha model.
Texturing
I just found out now that I was directly using the model that my friend had rigged to make the animation. If I want to rig again, I have to assign textures again. This is a tedious job, but it can help me review texturing.
This time I chose to use Ai stand surface as my material, because I used Maya2020’s new material stand surface before, which caused Maya2018 to be unable to read this material and I cannot use render farm. However, these two materials will have some differences. I only know how to adjust them by comparing the previous files.
For example, I forgot where the roughness map should be assigned, and why the texture of the skin after the assignment is still strange.
Also, I made a mistake. I forgot that the emissive map I exported should adjust the value to 1 (because I disconnected before, so the value is automatically adjusted to 0), otherwise the model only displays the base color. I thought it was a problem when I exported the textures, and I opened the SP to check.
All in all, I made a lot of mistakes, many of which were because I forgot how to operate. I am glad that I successfully solved them.
Finally, I re-assigned the material.
Rigging
Before officially starting, I have to make preparations:
- The model should be divided into a whole group.
- The inside of the mouth should be divided into three parts: upper teeth, lower teeth and tongue.
- Delete history. It is not possible to delete history during rigging.
- Make sure that the size of the model is appropriate. A model that is too large may cause problems.
- The model should be in the middle, so that the mirror can be used.
- The model’s feet should be on the ground.
- You can use animation layer to display separately if necessary.
- Hips should be in the center of the crosshair in the side view.
Through inspection, I found that Maha’s mouthlnt was not separated, so I separated and assigned textures. In addition, her feet were not completely on the horizontal surface, I adjusted slightly and deleted the history. Everything else is fine.
In Rre, I want to clean the model, but once I click clean, the head of the model will be deleted, so I won’t clean it anymore. In the same way, model check tells me that the arm, leg, and hips of my model are asymmetric, but I don’t know how to adjust it, so I ignored it first.
Because I am practicing, I don’t need to create a reference anymore.
Going to the Body menu, I chose biped under fit. This is the default skeleton. Although I also want to choose the biped game, I am worried that something will go wrong, so I still use the most commonly used skeleton. In addition, don’t forget to switch on FitMode in edit, which will reduce Maya errors.
First, we first assign the lower body, including hips and legs and feet:
- In the front view, you can only rotate the joints, do not move the joints at will. Can be moved in the side view.
- Almost all joints are controlled by local axis, try not to use world axis. The way to switch between the two is W + left mouse button.
In the second step I adjusted the spine, neck and head:
- The joints between Root joint and chest joint are equally scored. If there are only three joints, the middle joint can be lowered because the waist is more flexible than the chest.
- When placing the joint at the top of the neck, it can be placed behind the ears, because in this way, the mouth can be slightly selected.
- Control the joint of the eye, one is placed on the local axis of the eyeball (select transform display in the display menu), and one is placed at the center of the pupil.
In the third step I started to adjust my shoulders, arms and hands:
- The joints of the shoulder need to use the top view to determine the position.
- As with the legs, never move the Z axis, whether it is an arm or a finger.
The fourth step is to adjust the custom bone points. I need to add the joint points of the hair and the hair on the chest and feet:
- You can press shift to add the bone points in the blank area first, and then move to the corresponding position for adjustment.
- Select the root joint of each custom bone and the main joint that needs to be connected, and press P.
- Cluster can be used to determine the position of joints.
- Don’t forget to rename, there can be no duplicate joint names.
Then I choose to build advancedskeleton, model generation controller. In addition to changing the size of the controller, I also found that the head controller is very messy, so I recreated a bone to control all the hair, and it looks much better now.
Next, I need to bind my model. I followed the instructional video to try all the rigging methods that appear in the menu, but because of lack of experience and my model is not very good, I can’t use them perfectly, such as skincage, skinloop. But at least I tried it.
In the end, I used the most basic way, directly selecting bones and models to rig. At the beginning I wanted to bind accurately, so I also tried to adjust the value of each point in the component editor, but it took too much time, and I ran into a big trouble.
We can see that there is an error in the character’s knees. No matter how I draw the weight for each point, it can’t solve this problem. This problem troubled me for many days, and finally I asked Karl for help. Karl helped me to check it out, my model cannot use harden weights and delta mush, otherwise the knee edge will have problems. I didn’t expect that the method I experimented with in zbrush would affect my rigging.
I should have chosen a complex skeleton, so I directly deleted some joints in the outliner to make the skeleton look simpler.
If I encounter some points that I don’t know which joint is controlling, I will go to the component editor to check and delete the related weights. But this method is not a panacea.
For example, once I delete the weights on the shoe, the weights of the new three joints will be added. I guess it is because the system automatically assigns the weights. At this time, I can only go to paint weights.
Because of the peculiarity of my model, the chest cannot be changed, so I let the chest controller not control any joints, which also resulted in me having to balance the weights of the chest and shoulders on the waist controller. It turns out that I did not do well enough. I spent a lot of time adjusting, and finally used walk designer to check whether there was any damage to the model. (I also found a lot of problems.) In this way, the physical rigging is completed.
The rigging of the face is not too difficult, because adv already contains explanations, which can make it easier for us to rig. But I still encountered some minor troubles. For example, my object name is not unique. I checked it for a long time and found out that it was because my group name and object name were the same. I am renamed here, but I am not sure what new errors this might cause.
Finally, I checked the positions in the fit menu and built, but at this time Maya reminded me that the face was not symmetrical. In fact, adv discovered this problem when I cleaned the model, but once I cleaned it, my model would disappear, so I ignored this problem.
As a result, a new problem appeared when building eyebrow:
// Error: file: D:/Maya2020/AdvancedSkeleton5/AdvancedSkeleton5.mel line 27251: More than one object matches name: EyeBrowRegion_R
At this time adv will stop building. I don’t know where EyeBrowRegion_R is, but according to my experience, just adjust that region. I went back to the fit menu and only kept these three options, and this problem was solved.
The next step is to check the model and adjust the weights.
I found that the character’s mouth can’t make an o, and there will be problems with the model at this time. So I still use hammer skin weights to solve this problem.
After finishing face rigging, I started to use animation test to check my model. Of course, there are some bugs caused by the model, and my rigging cannot solve this problem.
But because of my lack of experience, I also linked the earrings with face rigging, which caused my earrings to be unable to be controlled by the original joints. Unless I re-rig face, I will not be able to solve this problem.
Anyway, the rigging of my model is complete!
Conclusion
This is my first attempt to rig a model! Although due to my lack of experience, I found that there are many problems with the model during rigging. But the most important thing is that rigging allows me to better understand modeling and animation, and can increase my skills! Not to mention the development of advanced skeleton5 to today, the function is getting simpler and simpler, but more and more powerful.