Just a side project. My wife requested a posable Minion to play with (I know it may sound weird), so I had to model it. Not yet as accurate and detailed as the original one, but it’s a good start I think. And I will learn rigging on this one, finally. Critique highly appreciated.
That must be balloon candy yes? 
Great Job !
I dig it…well, yeah, even if you point a gun at me, I never get tired of these guys.
Thanks, James! I like these tiny gnomes too!
Yeah, the minions. Everyone likes them. You one is looking good already and I’m curious how you are going to rig it
BTW and for the minion lovers: There is a funny mini challenge about minions at Gameartisans.org in the moment (http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/threads/63236-3D-Mini-51-MINION).
I did a basic rig today, but honestly, it is rather crap. Not that it is not working - it does, but it is skinned with the yellow body only. So it’s the body that is moving only. The rest of the model stays in place. I need to learn the way to make it properly. I guess that rest must be somehow connected to the rig (constraints/parenting). Also, there’s a lot do do with the weight paint, cause current deforamtions are pretty ugly. Need some time to learn it.
I feel your pain brother…one step forward, then run back a block. Makes me look at hammers in a whole new way.
You do have to love these guys
I think he looks really good.
So, I guess that the clothes are separate meshes.
There are several ways to do character clothing. But if your clothes are really separate meshes you can transfer the weights from the yellow body to each of the clothes. To do that select the piece of clothing, select the yellow body and then execute “transfer weights”. (You can jump quickly to the function by using the space bar menu). This function transfers the armature weight from the selected yellow body to the active piece of clothing - if you selected them in this specific order.
After you have done this you see new vertex groups, which have been created for the cloth. To make the cloth driven by the armature finally add an armature modifier to the cloth and select the same armature as you use for the yellow body. This works well, provided the edges of the cloth are following the body contours and are prepared to give nice deformations at the joints.
Now you will see the yellow body poke through the clothing in some poses. To prevent the body from doing that I usually use the mask modifier for the body. With this you can hide the parts of the yellow body that are covered by clothing (you must checkmark the invert option of the mask modifier for this).
This method of driving body and different clothing meshes by one armature works well, as you can see in my falcon thread.
A different approach is to model the body, then do the armature and weight paint on the naked body, select parts of the body which are meant to be covered by clothing, duplicate them, separate them from the mesh [all vertex groups and weights will be preserved] and assign an armature modifier to the new piece of cloth, again with the same armature as for the body.
And of course the clothes could simply be a part of the body mesh, that is Body and clothes together are one mesh. Most probably this would be the easiest way.
I don’t know if the head of the yellow Minion body is deforming? If that’s not the case you can simply parent the glasses and the strap to your head bone. They will follow the head bone after that.
It took me months to discover, how that all works, because good and complete tuts on that are rare. I hope this little explanation can shorten things for you 
Well, that explains a lot! Thanks for sharing, I will make use of that for sure. Firstly, I need to learn how to properly distribute weights, to reduce enormous stretching that happens now (with auto weights). Since I got frustrated trying to rig it yesterday, I decided to take a break and work on textures and some more details instead. Also, I posed the arm and fingers by modelling it:) Here’s an updated version of my Minion:
Looks cool! What’s next?
Thanks ITdreamer! Probably will make another attempt to rig it soon. Anyway I’m still working on my car, finishing it is most important than the Minion, so no idea when actually will try again to rig the gnome again:)
with the extreme cartoon form it makes rigs a bit tricky. I rebuilt mine a few times now and I still am not very happy with it. This tutorial goes through just the kind of problems your having…should give you some helpful pointers, it also uses a mask to get around the clothes poking through thing.
Thanks James! Gonna check this tut out!