To make the job less taxing (i.e. to take shortcuts especially due to my limited knowledge and limited time) I will learn to use the HumanIK tools in Maya to generate a standard biped human skeleton for Caruso. HIK is a very useful and easy to use tool that is compatible with the bone naming system on Motionbuilder so it'll be much easier to characterise Caruso this time round.
As you can see here in the outliner, the hierarchy of the skeleton is much tidier and named properly compared to the AdvancedSkeleton rig in a previous post. I followed video tutorials from this user on Youtube.
I decided to make things a little more intuitive so I used the move tool on the joints to place them correctly without worrying about how it affected the joint orientation. The joint orientation was corrected later. With virtually no rigging experience beforehand, I had to use a combination of reference images and gut instinct t decide if the bones were in the right place...it's not too difficult though since Caruso is a standard proportion human. The only slight trouble I got at the stage was in the fact that Caruso's arms are slightly bent, twisted and not a straight T-pose. Also the legs are slightly apart rather than falling straight down but this didn't affect anything really.
After binding the skeleton to the Mesh it was onto the weight painting. Again, I have VERY little experience in this area so I had to go with my instinct for much of the process. I have a feeling something will pop up to haunt me when I finally start animating.
I had a few problems with the joint placements so I unbinded the skeleton to modify some joints. For some reason the mesh would deform ever so slightly from the unbinding that it was near impossible to rebind perfectly. Along with forgetting to reset joint rotations when I was checking the deformations before unbinding (so the skeleton changed and I couldn't re-bind it perfectly) I lost some time having to re-do certain tasks and/or fixing broken things.
At this point I notice where I maybe should have placed an extra edge-loop for better deformations but as long as nothing really out of the ordinary occurs at joints then I'm pretty happy.
