Orienting, Binding and Weights

 When it came to orienting the controllers to the joints on this model, I did struggle at first because every time I clicked "orient" things kept going a bit wonky. However it turned out that it was because "maintain offset" was turned off.
Once that was turned on, everything was fine.

I then went through and simply oriented each controller to it's respective joint. This enabled the skeleton to be influenced by the movement of the joints. It was then time to bind the mesh to the rest. I did this by selecting the skeleton, appart from the end joints, and then selected "skin" and then smooth bind. This enabled the mesh itself to be moved by the skeleton.


Painting the Weights



The weights on the body needed to be changed in order to make sure that parts of the body weren't getting moved around and influenced by wrong areas of the geometry.

I did have a few problems with this:

• At first, the right foot was being influenced by the movement of the left foot, so I needed to go through and paint it with a value of zero so it would not be moved. This is something that needed doing over all areas of the body. 

For the turn around, I decided to keep the pose of this character quite simple, because there were a few issues with it,

• Not all of the influence weights were completely right, so for example, when the left arm was moved up too high, it did effect the left side underneath the arm .
• There was also a problem with the legs, I thin this was because I didn't bind something correctly. The knees were not able to be moved, however the controllers and heir-achy were all in place, so I may have oriented something incorrectly.  
• Also, at the end I realised that the eyes on this character were not moving with the head, so I must have missed out a stage of parenting the head to the eyes. 

Final Outcome

I am really pleased with everything I learnt whilst building this model, because before hand I had no idea how the process worked. However, if I were to do this again, I would pay closer attention to the smaller details. In this case, the character works fine for a turnaround and to show what I have learnt, but I wouldn't at this stage hand it over to somebody to animate, because there are some areas that are not quite right. I am aware that the eyes are not bound properly to the head, so they don't move when the head is moved, and some of the influence weights are not quite right. I had some trouble right at the end with the controllers for the knees, I think this was because I went wrong somewhere when it came to putting in the heir achy.

In all honesty even though there are some areas of this model that aren'r right, it did genuinely help me to improve my mermaid model and make me aware of some problems to try and stay clear of. On the whole however, I have learnt a lot whilst doing this, and really enjoyed it! Asa result of this study task, I was able to Finnish the whole modelling process of my mermaid much faster than I had expected.

Final Turn Around