Binary Souls / Other Dimensions – A webcomic, music and other geekery!

I’ve been having quite a frustrating day.  While I probably don’t need to explain the specifics, let’s just say that I hate waiting for someone else to finish their job so that I can move on with my day.  I’m doing my best to keep my cool.

So, as I sat in my living room all day waiting for things to happen, I ended up doing a bit of modeling.  I really had no idea on what I wanted to model since I wasn’t sure how much time I’d be able to dedicate to getting it finished.  So, I looked at the objects that were near me and there was the pill case that stores my daily meds and vitamins. It’s a rather simple piece of work but it might be useful to someone who needs a bit of clutter for a scene their working on.  You can click on the image to the left if you want to download it.  It’s set up to load in any program that uses Poser figures.

Well, that was true when I frist modeled Gogler.  When creating a 3D character, the modeling and texturing is only part of the equation.  Without any sort of bone structure, it’s just a statue.  The unfortunate thing about creating a tentacled beast like this is that there are quite a few bones to deal with.

If you check out the image to the left, you can get an idea of what the skeleton looks like.  Each one of the diamond shapes represents a joint while the triangular ones represent a bone.  The concept of rigging a character is pretty intuitive if you look at how your own body moves.

Setting up the skeleton is probably the easiest part in rigging a character.  The most difficult part comes when you need to tell the software how each joint effects other joints.  You also have to set limits as to how far a particular joint will rotate.  This process is what takes a lot of time.

While Carrara does a pretty good job at setting up the basic parameters for rigging a character, things get a little strange when you have one that’s not shaped like your typical bipedal character.  I immediately realized that when I first rotated the right side of the bone in Gogler’s waist.  If you click here, you can see what didn’t look right. Yep! It’s not very pretty.

What I needed to do was adjust is how that joint effected other areas of character.  If you click here, you can see what the weight painting looked like prior to correcting the problem. A good portion of the tentacle on the right side of his body wasn’t included in the movement of that particular joint.  If you click here, you can see what it looked like after I fixed it. The more yellow it is, the stronger the effect. The orange area gets less of an effect.

As it stands, I have only done a couple of the major joints on Gogler’s body.  The one problem with Carrara is does not let you do this weight painting with symmetry.  That means I have to do both sides separately.  While it’s taking me a while to go through this process, I feel that I’m learning quite a bit.  This is actually the first time I’ve attempted to rig a full character within Carrara.  Hopefully I can finish this during the coming week.