Rigging & Paint Weighting

Haven't posted in a while so here's what i have done so far.

I decided to start rigging the character first rather then texture it as i wanted to get the more time consuming rigging out of the way.

I pretty much started putting the skeleton joints in the mesh from scratch and i was following a specific tutorial in placing and position the joints in the correct way. Its all based on the human anatomy and if you know where your joints are in your body then you just apply the same principles into the model.

Once i have finished putting the joints in the model i then binded it together as one entity. The process is called skin bind. After that was done i then started on the paint weighting of the model.

Paint weighting is important as it adds weight to the model, this will help to keep the mesh in place. So when your animating, the mesh will stay intact and will not go all over the place.

When your paint weighting, you basically paint on to the model like a brush. The white area is where the weight is applied and the black area in the model is where there is no weight applied.

I have come across problems during paint weighting. One of them was that my macbook couldn't handle the paint weighting process and kept quitting. So i decided to use a PC and also upgraded from using Maya 8.5 to Maya 2010. I did purely because it was the only version of maya that was on the PC at Ravensbourne.

So as i expected, paint weighting was time consuming as with anything in Maya. Once paint weighting was done at around 70%, my next stage was to start putting in the IK handles which will help to animate the character. The reason why i stopped at half way at paint weighting was because putting in the IK handle and animating it revealed more anamoly on the mesh of the model. So thats why im gonna paint weight it more when i put in the IK handles on the model.