To say I have little experience in rigging is an understatement. Having only really done a short tutorial on rigging a foot, and using Anzovin's The Setup Machine (auto-rig) for a few small projects, I felt very out of my depth when it came to rigging Caruso for the Knightside Chronicles game. After a little research it came to my attention that The Setup Machine wasn't designed to handle motion capture data so my options now are to build a rig from scratch OR to find another short cut. A fellow coursemate introduced me to an interesting Maya plugin called "Advanced Skeleton" which is a set of tools designed to help build a standard biped, bug and quadraped rig. Being a free tool I might as well give it a try, and I found some tutorials on youtube to follow for learning to use the tools.
Everything was going very well as I carefully followed each step of the tutorial and I managed to place everything in the FITskeleton to the desired locations...UNTIL the advanced skeleton was built:
This was where things started differing from the tutorial and I could find no possible reason why things should go so horribly wrong. As you can see, the ring on the torso is rotated oddly and the red box-shaped controls by the hip...well...they're meant to be by the feet :/ however, I persisted to see how it affected the rig:
Advaned Skeleton has an interesting feature called SkinCage which helps to minimise the need for weight painting after skinning to the mesh - the crude boxy meshes that are created need to be resized to be as snug as possible with the mesh to be rigged. Unfortunately the skincage differed a LOT for my mesh - the strange torso and the massive vertical feet are sure signs that something has gone terribly wrong.
Still, out of curiosity I clicked "copy skin to selected mesh" and lo and behold:
Some [expected] bizzare deformations. It is safe to assume I will be looking for alternative methods for rigging the character. Right now I am horribly behind schedule with production but 4 weeks is still enough time to get everything done - at least the modelling and texturing are almost complete - they were pretty time consuming due to me being a bit of a fickle perfectionist.
