3D Animation

3D Character Animation – Development Log 1 (Topology & Rigging)

Before rigging my Character, I forgot to Remesh my Character, therefore my character has a bad topology, and when it would come to animating my character, the bad topology would ruin the quality of the animation. I quickly took my model back to ZBrush to remesh my model which improved my topology to a suitable level shown in the second image below

bad Topology
Good Topology

After fixing the topology, I took my model back to Maya where I overlayed my original rig over my new model, therefore I didn’t need to re-rig my Character

I also decided to Rig my character’s wings but I am still unsure how to fully animate them. However, I decided to add some leg and arm controllers to easily control the IK handles.

Ik Leg Controllers

The Rig worked really well with my legs but I am still yet to weight paint, therefore there is some slight pulling on the torso and wings of the character when moving the legs

IK Arm Controller

The Rig also works really well on the arms but there is still pulling on the wings and some obvious clipping through the wings if the arms are moved too far back which should be fixed when I come to weight painting my model

Wings

I then started experimenting with the wings and how I would go about animating each of the ‘bone’ sections and to see how the wing membrane would react to the animations of the bones.