Rigging and Weight Painting!
Now unfortunately, due to the nature of Grub’s design as a character, I was unable to run him through mixamo, as the software had absolutely no clue how to rig Grub in general. As a result of this problem, I had to result to manually rigging Grub. I first tried to achieve this by making use of Rigify, a blender addon that helps with generating rigs, but unfortunately, it also had no idea how to make IK’s and other rigging essentials work for Grub.
As a result of this, I had to manually rig my model, making use of IK, and weight painting Grub entirely by myself.
Something you may also notice, is that the hair is much like the old hi-poly version from previous weeks. It is, but also it has been retopologised, specially by Zbrush’s Zremesher. I managed to get it down from 120,000 polys to around 25,000 polys by clicking 2 buttons, and it ends up looking so much better than my decimated version of the hair.
Moving onto the weight painting I did for this project, the process took a while even having used blenders transfer weight function to make a basis for the clothing, but ended up struggling a bit, as the cloak and trousers would keep clipping and dragging the wrong weights which was quite infuriating. I noticed however, this wasn’t a weight problem, but a general problem with topology, as the two parts of the trousers were physically attached, so i seperated them to fix the problem. Besides, here are some examples of my weighting process.
All of these work with IK that are assigned on the rig, and look quite accurate. The hair looks the smoothest out of all, as that was the part I weighted last after learning a really efficient way to smooth out the weights by using the blur brush. If I ever had problems with the weights, I would drag out the skeleton, and remove any un-needed weights or incorrect weights, and that worked quite well.
Texture Painting!
To make Grub look like Grub, I needed to texture paint him. Due to the limits of skylanders being my IP, I couldn’t go for photo-realism (not that it matched my style regardless) so I went with a more pixel based texture style, and did this by using blenders texture paint mode, and there are specific fall-off settings for brush drawing that means the outer is pixelated rather than soft and smoothed, corresponding with my IP choice.
Originally, I used substance painted for a few things, such as the crown and the hair, and these I did in 256×256 to fit with the actual texture size of skylanders originally. However, I soon discovered that having a higher resolution conveys the detail better in the end as there are more pixels for the fall-off to flow to.
I held off of adding normal and bump maps to this model, as back in skylanders age of texturing, this technology wasn’t readily available, and let alone could perform on devices, so I chose to keep the colours and textures flat for this reason.
Animation!
Considering Grub refused to work with mixamo, it meant that I had to create my own animation for Grub. Originally I had planned to do a jumping wave, but I had to compromise due to my IK’s making things difficult. As a result, I went with a basic energetic jump. I ended up fully rendering this and having it uploaded with a few sounds. The final result is about 4 seconds long.
With the animation being complete, this is the final step of pipeline for Grub! It was a fun project to work on, and gave me the ability to tackle modelling a character head-on, as in previous projects I was always more of a supportive role when it came to character development, so it felt satisfying to make everything on my own in such a short amount of time!