KNB217 Assignment 2 Human Character: Reflection
Rigging
I started rigging too late into production so there are plenty of things that could be improved. I’m unhappy with the placement of the wrists and scapula joints and perhaps the toes could be in a better place.
The face is mostly fine with a few problems with the inner lip being too close to the main lip edge loop causing it to clip into the lip and leaving me unable to do any open mouth smiles on the mode without clipping. The eyes also don’t close the entire way without me adjusting the face joints individually due to me sculpting the eyes as an exaggerated lopsided almond. (Jones, J. 2018)
Skinning
I didn’t have too many errors to fix in skinning because I made the skin cage fit very close to the model so there wasn’t too many errors in the skinning. I just made sure the joints would ‘squish’ together better like the thighs against the torso and the knees, and forearm and upper arm, and in particular the breasts when the chest is moving around were stretched too much with the model so I had to bind them to the chest more to create the illusion that they are separate objects that are subtly changed by the muscle movement, like they are in real life. Unfortunately, because I left this so late, I completely forgot to adjust in the skin in a few key areas like the neck being too heavily distorted by head movement, with the model unable to turn its head too much to either side.
Animating
This section did not give me much trouble since the animations did not have to be timed well and just flowed from key to key, however it was in this stage I found a lot of things I missed with the skinning and rigging that it was too late to go back and fix. I was unable to recreate the characters signature open mouth smile because of my errors rigging, and I broke the rig somehow so that the neck joint would not accept any key frames so that could not be in the calisthenics videos and had to be screenshot instead. (Maestri, G. 2015) (Animation Mentor Blog. 2019)
I made sure to make the expressions rather exaggerated as the character herself is quite open and unrestricted with her emotions. The only expressions I did not do this with was contempt, since it is more of a microrexpression and sadness, since I found if I pushed it too much she would look too pouty and sullen and not truly sad. (Science of People. 2019)
