Month: April 2024

Rigging, Continued…

Now with our armatures in place, its time to weight paint my character! For the most part, I made heavy use of blenders Automatic Weights function when you go to parent a model to an armature, as it typically provides quite accurate and strong results. This was the case for my base mesh of my character, as it moved all the appropriate limbs very smoothly and in a way that fit its character.

However, the suction cups seemed to prove a bit challenging, considering each tentacles suction cups are in very close proximity so its quite easy for the weights to get confused. For refenence, I did not make use of automatic weights for the suction cups, I used Weight Transfer as that typically is more accurate and if there are any issues, the weights are easy to correct. I will provide the thread that I used to learn this process, as it may be useful if you are ever rigging! (Check the comments)

For now, take enjoyment in what I ended up having to fix, as it took a sec to try and manage all the suction cups in their places, as well as the fact that sometimes I would just have a specfic vertice or two that decided that they didnt want to be weight painted.

On the bright side, the finished result looks great and functions amazingly! I was really happy that everything turned out so well for it. Honestly at this point if I had just designed the squid I would’ve run with it for the rest of the project. Aside from this it does has its suit that also needs to be weighted, and luckily it was a lot simpler.

Considering the robotic nature of the suit, it needs to be heavily weighted to react to the bones, meaning no geometry deforming, so all red based on its bone. I made sure to specifically create bones for each panel or part of the suit, so that I could have full exact control of each component of the suit without any issue.

This same structure was applied to each and every bone/component of the suit and proved to work quite well, as the HipControllerBones (the Middle Ones) did a great job of splitting the suit into 2 as a lot of the bones are parented by offset to those central bones. Having the squid show in there also shows that its a seperate rig, otherwise the squid would also be a dark blue like the suit is, but its just displaying face orientation in a light blue.

I also weight painted the small armbands that go around my characters arm tentacles, it was also quite an easy process as I just had to transfer weights from the main body over, and make some small adjustments as it was using too many vertex groups/bones to rig when it wasn’t necessarily needed. Same case with extra bolts I added for detail purposes, except those were all red to be mounted to the exact part of the suit they were placed at.

But for now! Everything is properly rigged and working nicely! So I can now move onto two of the most significant parts of this project, texturing and animation! See you in week 9 for texturing!

UV Mapping!

Time to UV my models to get ready for the texturing process! I decided to move onto this first as it was the quickest task for me to do, considering I just have to mark my models seams, before Smart UV Unwrapping and marking the boundaries for the UV to be even. Starting with the squid itself, I had 2 iterations, as the first had some inconsistancies in the bottom left of the UV. Whilst it would’ve worked fine in any case, I still want to make sure I create efficient UV’s for the future work and portfolio reasons, so I remade it.

Following from this, I UV’ed the suit, smaller details such as the bolts on the suit and the suction cups I didn’t UV, as going into Substance Painter, it would automatically adjust. However for future reference, I will UV the singular one before I start copying and pasting it around, this also applies to the bolts. Helmet also had 2 Versions, on before all the extras and details.

Rigging!

Following the UV unwrapping, I decided to create the base armature for my model! Weighting it will be an issue for next week as there are a lot more technicalities I need to consider when it comes to weights so I will work on that next week instead of this week.

As you can see, the rig itself is quite basic, this is due to the motion of mind that it is an octopus/squid type character, so as a result I have no need for functions such as Inverse Kinetics and CR, CL and Controller bones considering I can rotate these bones on individual origins when I select the whole chain, resulting in the same type of squid/octopus flow that you could expect in real life. It is interesting however having to rig a creature that has no bones in real life.

Alongside this, I wanted to create a seperate rig for the suit, as I feel like weighting it to this would be a nightmare, as well as the fact that the multiple bones would split the geometry of the suit, unless I was rigging one part to one bone specifically, which has its own set of problems from experience. It also allows me to have much more control over what i’m doing when it comes to animation later down the line.

For now this is all! I will delve into weight painting next week, followed by texturing, animation and rendering processes! See you in week 8!

Suction Cups…. Continued…

As I mentioned last week, I spent a lot of the time this week working on adding suction cups to the arms tentacles of my character. I definitely feel these turned out much better, as I did have a feel for how the array structure went, so I sorta optimised it to be a bit quicker. Also, unlike the legs, there wasn’t any sections with overlapping verts or deformed shapes, unlike the legs that had a plethera of messes that I couldn’t really fix.

The polycount it self was fine for what it was as the mesh was still sharp and detailed enough to resemble what I wanted, whilst 54k is not ideal, there is a lot of suction cups that need to be accounted for, so it was already impossible to make this really low poly considering the round shape of a suction cup. I will provide images below;

Retopology!!

Now before coming into retopology, I was already intimidated and frustrated due to the time it took for me to create and apply suction cups to the body of my character. I had heard from a friend that they used a mirror and welding strategy (in blender) to essentially weld new polygons, to the old shape whilst staying in different objects. Unfortunately I couldn’t figure out how to work that method efficiently, so I went and researched into some addons that act like Maya’s Retopology Mode. It was at this point I was graced by the heavens: Retopoflow 3.

I had previously downloaded this addon to try and make use of it in a unit from last year (1st 3D character Unit) however, I couldn’t really get the grasp of how to use it, and therefore left it. But upon rediscovering it and watching some youtube tutorials on the basics for it; I was hooked. It managed to provide me with such an efficient working environment and workflow that retopology was honestly the easiest thing I had to do in this entire project, and was actually something I turned out to enjoy, as maybe listening to music whilst retopologising a model isn’t that bad after all. It still took a while, so this was done throughout Week 6 from here on out.

There were a few tools that I made extensive use out of, such as Strokes, Contours, Polypen, Knife and Relax. All of these have an essential purpose and areas of which they were more effective than others in the project, in particular Contours was incredible for the tentacles, as it creates an edgeloop around the model which then can be linked to another edge-loop at the click of a button. Polypen and Knife were useful for fixing topology issues, in which other cases I made use of the Loops tool to add an edge loop if something was off, before relaxing it with Relax and fixing it further.

It didn’t take nowhere near as long as I anticipated, and to some extent I am happy about that, but I also enjoyed it so much so I feel conflicted. I will make sure to do more projects like this one to keep retopologising, or just offering to retopologise my friends work. Alas, here is the final result compared to the sculpted one!

As you can notice, there is essentially no difference, the only thing being how blenders lighting affects the top part of the head, but it still has the same ridge that seperates it, and the same indent on the skin between the legs. Tentacles and Eyes look identical.

Here is the complete current pipeline of my character! From start to finish at the moment, but now is onto the other main parts of this project, such as UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging and animation. Until Week 7!