Advanced Character Rigging - Part Three

Part Three

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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. Select the Smooth function, resize the brush so you don't accidentally paint somewhere else & select the solid round brush at the top:

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

Now select the LeftLeg joint (or lower left leg joint you may have) & paint the vertices above, and back of, the lowerleg.

If you did it correctly then there'll be a big improvement when you're done:

When you're done refining your rig, select the origin bone in the Outliner, go to the menu and click - Skin > Go to Bind Pose & your original pose will spring back to where it was.

What? I left out the Add function of the weight painter? For those stubborn rigging problems that smoothing won't work with, you use Add in small increments

I normally use weight values of 0.1000 when I'm adding weights so I don't overdo it the first time.

Other tips:

• When working with leg meshes, I flood them with the "Hips" with a weight value of one
• When I'm working on a torso, I flood them with the "Spine"

Just because I hate stray weights . . .

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