FMP - Easter Break #1

 

With it being the Easter holidays, I do want to give myself some down time since I have been working on my FMP for near 4 months now. But I still have some portions of the project that are important to complete so I’ll keeping working for the time being.

The main situation now: rigging and skinning.

In hindsight, I think it’s better that I’ve done all the rigging and skinning at once rather than individually during the whole model creation process like I’d planned. It just means I’m in the right mindset to easily hop between the models if I need to make tweaks on encounter any issues.

Speaking of issues, my original thought process with setting up my rigs was already an issue. My knowledge of rigging in 3DSMax had been to use the biped as my rig, adjust according to the shape of my model and then skin from there. This works for basic figure models- a standard human with 4 limbs, a torso and a head. But that wasn’t the case with all my models. 2 of my characters didn’t have legs and the one that did had goat legs. That was how I discovered the limitation within 3DSMax where you can’t edit the premade biped, deleting a bone would delete the whole skeleton. So instead of using the biped, I had to make the rigs for each character from scratch using the CATRig tool.

This was a new method for me but it was a necessity to figure it out for the sake of having poseable models. I created Justice’s rig first as I thought that would be the most complicated since his legs were specifically shaped. Making sure the joints bent at the right angles was a run of trial and error to be honest, ensuring the parenting of the bones was correct and that it would function correctly when in a pose. After slowly building the rig for Justice though (with a few restarts along the way) I got to grips with how the CATRig system worked. It wasn’t overtly complicated, it just seemed so because it was new to me. Having to resort to this method made rigging take longer than I thought.

After completing the first rig for Justice, I decided to go to skinning him straight away in case I met another bump in the road. Skinning however functioned the same as always- I applied a skin modifier to the model, attached the bones, and then started adjusting the weight paints accordingly. This was much more straightforward and I was able to gradually skin Justice as I was used to.

Posed Model

I followed this process for the other 2 characters: creating a CATRig for the High Priestess then immediately skinning, then the same for Judgement. Naturally I was faster the second time round creating the rig and even faster the third and after having done it 3 times, I think I prefer to use the CATRig rather than the biped. I think the only benefit to the biped is that it’s quickest if you just have a very standard character. But even if all my characters were just 4 limbed humans, the CATRig is so much more customizable and easy to manipulate, it really shows the limitations of the basic biped. I’m glad I discovered this method as I’ll probably use it now going forward if I’m to rig in 3DSMax again.