Advanced Character Rigging - Part Three

Part Three

Back to Advanced character rigging Introduction Back to Advanced Character Rigging - Part Two

After all that work of paint those skin weights (wait, you didn't rig the left arm mesh to the right upper leg joint did you?) it's time to refine our rig. So far my left upper leg mesh is rigged to LeftUpLeg, while the lower leg mesh is rigged to . . . well . . . LeftLeg:

Easy enough? But wait (weight?) . . . What happens if we rotate the lower leg back? Let's find out!

Open the Outliner & shift-click the square to the left of the origin joint:

This will expand the joint hierarchy. Now select the LeftLeg joint & rotate that joint backwards. For this example I didn't have to rotate it too far:

The lower leg is not behaving naturally. So how do we fix it? I'll tell you but you'd better be nice to me & send money to my PayPal account . . . oh wait, I need to update that account . . .

Keep the leg in that rotation while we do a little something extra to it. This is where those handy-dandy functions like Add & Smooth come in. Select the leg mesh again then go back to the weight painter. Resize the brush so you don't accidentally paint somewhere else & select the solid round brush at the top:

(I actually have the third one selected but hopefully you get the idea)

Now click on the smooth function, select the LeftUpLeg joint (or whichever left upper leg joint you have), & paint the vertices above, and back of, the lower leg: