Dear Riggers,
I’m still tweaking this character so it may change but the idea should stay the same, a cartoony-shaped simple character.
My question is, should I separate / slice the Pants and OTHER parts for easier Weight Skinning?
or should I keep the model as ONE piece and… struggle?
Even dough It’s a very early stage of the character, as I practice and learning it will be very appreciate to get some helpful tips from you guys, THANKS AHEAD!
For weight painting? Slicing it off will make it more difficult to skin, not easier. This is a model that should work pretty well with automatic weights if you leave it in one piece.
The reason I’m considering slicing is because I thought maybe it will allow me to weight painting (or vertex group manually) for more control and less distorted on other parts but I didn’t try it yet since I don’t want to waste time on weight painting more than once.
Your suggestion makes much more sense, thanks for the advice!
Any other tips / suggestions are welcome from anyone of course.
there is not enough vertices for the character to deform properly. Especially on elbows.
Keep it in one piece, and add some subdivisions around the areas that are likely to bend, like Jerzy advised (elbow, knuckles, shoulders…).
Thanks everyone for your advice!
True, the screenshot was too early, I didn’t even add all the loops around the bendy areas, will do that.
ANOTHER QUESTION:
I’m not sure how should I handle the head… which is also the body if it’s all one piece as you guys suggested.
How should I rig it, once I’ll model the mouth + teeth + eyeballs?
I’m guessing that I will make the Eyeballs separate objects and parent them to the main object, right?
What about the Mouth Teeth + Tongue? Sub-Object inside the main object? or separate?
The reason I’m asking about these is, what happens when the HEAD will rotate / twist to the sides? I don’t want the other parts to tweak or get out of original place.
I hope you understand my confusion as it is a ONE object with Body + Head that I would like to rig correct without having animation issues or limits.
Any advice? examples?
Thanks ahead!
I constantly fix my model while rigging. It doesn’t really matter if you make a rig before or after the teeth modeling. You can always go back to areas that needs fixing. Unless you are using complex shapekeys or hair particles that can be entirely screwed up after you change the toplogy.
Its good to have eyeballs as a separated object with its origin point in the center of the eyeball. It makes eye rigging much much simpler. Don’t parent them to anything else then eye bones in the rig.
If you have a character containing many geometry objects, like eyeballs always parent all of those objects to the armature or the bones in that armature. The armature should be “the main object”
As it comes to the tongue it is usually separeted from the head geometry, you shouldn’t be able to see it’s intersection anyway. What matters is that it should have the same armature modifier.
Things like teeth are better to keep on separeted objects as you rarely ever want them to anyhow deform, so you don’t want to share the armature modifer with the head. Parent upper teeth to upper teeth bone and then you can parents the bone setup however you want.
Thanks for the great details of tips, I will try to do this as I will start the rigging part as you suggested.
I hope I won’t get weird “ratio” issues when the head geometry will turn as it will tweak it’s original shape the mouth, teeth, eyeballs may go out of the geometry since it’s a weird one part character and not an individual head/skull which obviously will be easier to follow the armature without popping out of the head geometry.
I’ll have to do some tests I guess, hope it won’t be too complex for me.
I may share the progress if I’ll get to some weird situations, I believe you can help since you’re more experience, thanks again!
