Portfolio 3 - Character Rigging and Animation

The Model of the Week

This week, we were tasked with modelling and rigging a character to fit the tourist attraction scene from last week. Since my scene was basically nonsensical, I took this as a sign I could model and animate whatever character I wanted to. Was I supposed to do this? I don't know. Moving on, I created a sort of outlandish ghostly character vaguely inspired from memory by an ancient Egyptian god called Medjed, who looks like this:

Image credit: (Wikimedia Commons)

Rigging and Animations

The rigging and animating section of this week's task is straightforward in theory- you create a series of bones (an armature) for each major section of the body and you map it to the mesh in a process known as weight painting. Then you can pose the model as much as you want and save each pose to a keyframe of animation. Most of it is relatively straightforward, however I always tend to find the weight painting step tedious since the automatically generated weight painting is never incredibly accurate. I had to tweak every bone in the armature to make sure it was deforming the mesh in the right places.

On the subject of the animation, it was probably one of the simpler parts of the process- I picked a few key poses for a few bones and Blender interpolated between them automatically, though I did tweak this interpolation a little to get it looking OK. I wanted the animations to reflect the character, being a little weird and off-kilter. This is expressed in the position of the arms and the side to side motion in the walk animation, the "head" turning in the idle animation, as if the face was just a sheet being stretched, and the beckoning animation in general, which does strike me as more ominous than the suggested waving animation. You can see the animations below, as well as the position of the bones during them: