The Bones are Ready to Jiggy

It's been a long couple of weeks but the rigs are done! It didn't come with anything short of a lot of problems but they are done. I want to take this post to go through the rigs and talk about things I learned and things that went wrong and how I went about fixing them. First I'll talk about the main character and his five costumes. I modeled this character so I was more familiar with him and was more aware of rigging when I was modeling. At first, there were no problems and the rigging was going great but found that the poofy bottom of his sweatshirt wasn't deforming the way I wanted. I fixed this by weight painting a bit of the bottom to the hips more and it fixed the strange deforming. When it came to the base main character it really was the easiest of all of the rigs, the costumes however were a different story. The biggest problem I had with all of the costumes was the clipping that would happen with the sweatshirt and the costume pieces. This was because we didn't make new models we just sculpted new costume pieces that we put over the original. After a lot of balancing the weights between the costume and the sweatshirt, I was able to find a sweet spot where nothing clips until you stretch the rig to farther than it would ever bend. Overall, all of the rigs I had to do for the main character were my favorite to do for this short by far. When it came to the Boss reaper, I only had to do one rig, and the only problem I ran into with that character was the undershirt clipping through the outer shirt, but it was just a simple weight painting fix. Definitely the character with the least amount of problems. Our background character/customer character was simple to rig but the problems came when I moved it over to the server and tried to hook it up into our file system. When I opened the file the character's left arm just wouldn't appear, it showed up in the outliner as visible but would not show up in the render or just the base maya scene. Looking it up people made it sound like a texture problem, but when I would do anything to the texture nothing would change in the scene. Since nothing was fixing my problem I just went into the texture scene that I was referencing and decided to combine the two arms that were separate GEO's before, and it fixed the problem of the left arm not showing up. I did have to redo the weights, but it was worth it to get the arm to show up. When it came to the Granny and the Little Girl, I ran into the same problems, so I'll talk about them together. The biggest problem I had with these characters was the face rig. This was the first time I used the Advanced Skeleton rig set up to do the face and so it was mostly just testing it then redoing it until I was happy with the deformations. The little girl's eyes kept getting put in the wrong place, so all I had to do was change the point at which the eye pivots until it looked natural. When it came to the Granny's face I ran into a problem where none of the face blendshapes would deform the geometry. After a bunch of different setups and tries, I concluded that the lips and the area around them were pushed too far back into the face for the blendshapes created by the rig setup to work. I took the face into ZBrush and just pulled it forward and then re-rigged it and it worked just fine. One problem I did run into with all of the rigs was objects coming in green in the scene but just importing the geometry and reapplying the textured fixed that problem. After doing all of these rigs I'm so happy to be done, but can't wait to see them all moving in the scene! Looking forward to the final product of our short that is quickly approaching. I also want to say that my group helped a lot when I ran into problems and am super thankful for their support and help.