Module 2 Devlog

Modelling:

This week, for our self-study,  we were required to model a character, use armature to give the model bones and rig it. Once it was rigged we were then to animate walking, waving and an idle animation. The modelling aspect for me was the easiest yet rigging was quicker. The reason the modelling was easier was I have done a bit of modelling already. I decided to make a robot character with a TV as a head, I did this as I thought it would be a cool character.

Original 3D Model Of Character

After many problems with the rigging I had to revisit this and recreate my model but it ended up pretty similar to the first one.

Bones and Rigging:

For the bones I used the rigify addon in blender to create a basic human rig and then modelled it to the shape of my character model. After this I used the generate rig button inside blender to automatically create a rig for animating my character. This is where many problems arose that took me a long time to fix. The first was the scaling of the rig was strange and did not fit the model even though it was generated from the armature modelled to my character. The second bigger problem was my model was not moving in pose mode when I parented it to the rig and/or armature, I fixed this problem but recreating the character (as mentioned above). This fixed it because there are some weird things where BLENDER IS STUPID and thats the explanation as to why it worked HAHAHAHA... Anyway here my new character model with the rig attached. 

Here is the model with the rig surrounding it, the arrow is pointing to the problem I had where the model was not actually moving with the rig, however this was fixed and above is also the new character model.

Animating:

Okay... I have found out, I hate animating, maybe it was just this terrible experience of it but I hope not to revisit this anytime soon (at least not with models I have made). The animations we were tasked with making were a walking, waving and idle animation. I must preface however, the walking animation looks very dodgy, as I said, the rigging was not working well at all and no amount of trouble shooting seemed to fix it. No matter, I gave it my best shot and didn't turn out too bad, just think of it as a robot who was programmed well...

Walking:

As you can see, his arms are quite off, this is partly due to me having to skip frames to upload this gif, but also the rig was causing his arms to rotate weirdly and forced it to act strange. I also chose to make his legs slide as it game it more of a robotic feel

Waving:

Waving was the easiest, however again you can see how to rig has cause the right arm to act strange, twist and stretch

Idle:

Whoops, didn't realise his foot was in the ground..

Overall I am quite happy with how it turned out, I spent more time on the rigging and animating that I would have liked but sometimes things just don't go your way. If I was to do it again I wouldn't... (jk, but not jk), but if I had to it would certainly turn out better I'm sure of it. The modelling went very well, but having to redo it sucked, the rigging went alright but did not want to actually affect the model and when it did work, I kinda didn't work properly, hence caused the animating to be a pain. I think doing it again would yield much better results and I'm sure I am capable of more than the above however sometimes we have to learn the hard way. :( 

References:

Here you can find a link to a playlist for modelling, rigging and animating