Self Study #2

So, number two. This week was focusing on probably my least favourite thing in 3D game development (actually probably in all game development) which was bones, rigging and animation. I think most of the reason I hate rigging and animation besides being tedious is because it is probably the most soulful visual element in a game and me being a perfectionist, the animations have to perfectly reflect the vibe I want in my game. And I suck at that.

The Mesh

With that little opinion piece out of the way, we begin. I started with the character’s mesh, which was a character I was actually quite excited to model - a little guy that recurs in all my sketchbooks. A lot of the heavy lifting during modelling was done by a mirror modifier and a subdivision surface modifier. Unfortunately I forgot to screenshot during the early stages but with the wind in my sails, I was in the zone and knocked out this little guy in a bit under an hour.

Texturing

While yes, texturing (at least I think) was optional, this little man needed it. I did probably the worlds laziest UV unwrap, which was done by selecting the front and back halves of the mesh, pointing the camera front and back and using Project From View. This did cause some issues with the texture warping and losing detail around the seams which could have been addressed by properly unwrapping however this approach is good enough for the purposes of the self study.

Bones

Bones. I hate this part because of how tedious it is. Fortunately for me, rigify exists. The default rigify human rig minus a few details fit my model nearly perfectly with a little bit of adjusting. There were a few issues with the rigify approach however, that being the automatic vertex weights that it uses causing some real weird warping in the elbows of my character. This was resolved by modifying the automatic vertex weights and painting in my own around the arms. I adjusted the pose to be interactive with the elbows so I could see in real time the effects of the redistributed vertex weights. I could have become obsessive with this stage and made all the joints perfect, however nothing else was really that bad so I decided “eh, good enough” and left it at that.

Animating

So I really hate animating. I suck at it. But a few keyframes later I ended up with the quota of an idle, a walk and a wave. I don’t have much to say in this section because honestly my animating workflow is as follows: I let some ethereal force take me over like the green goblin (Willem Dafoe’s rendition in particular) and then I wake up a few hours later and I have a bunch of actions saved.

The Results

I think the animations turned out alright, no clue what happened with the walking one besides the easing could have been better and the keyframes went out of wack a little bit. The wave and idle were fine though, I think they reflect the mildly unnerving feel I was going for with my little guy (his name is George btw). I was going to add a texture animation for the face to maybe make him blink or even move his mouth a little but I just don’t want to open up that can of worms at 11:27pm on a Monday night.