This week has been yet another slow one due to physical and mental health related matters, but I have been able to make some progress out of it when possible. At this stage I'm mostly just polishing textures for the characters, getting a bit of environment detailing in, and making a start on rigging.
Sonic's texturing for very near completion, with the only real edits needing to be done are the direction that the fur travels on both the base and the fur fuzz. I ended up reworking the high poly bake of the shoes in order to fix issues with the bake, and to add an ID map for sectioning off different parts of the material. I gave a little more detail to the pupils as well, though all I need to do next for it is to add the pattern you'd normally see within a pupil.
I added in some of the tertiary detail that I needed to add onto Eggman ahead of the rigging stage. The buckles for the shoes and the zipper for the coat had been foolishly forgotten by me during the retopology stage, and I needed to add those in when possible.
Looking back, I really shouldn't have rushed this stage as much as I did. It ended up causing some issues regarding UV sets, and overall could have been more efficiently handled if I organised myself more professionally before moving onto the next steps.
As for my rigging, right now I've only made a start on Eggman. For Eggman I've decided to save some time by putting him through Mixamo's auto rigging, and then bringing the skeletal structure into Maya with the correct orientation to apply to the mesh. This way I can then bind it in Maya and weight paint it myself to get more desired results. I did make quite a few mistakes and found myself starting over, so not as much progress was done on it last week as I would have hoped.
I put together some rough versions of the environment assets needed for my diorama scene, albeit not all of them as of now. I've done the platform they'll be standing on which needs to be uv mapped properly and baked, an early mockup of the sunflower and an item monitor as a blueprint which holds a ring currently. I may decide to turn this into a 1 up later, which will have a 2D image inside the monitor instead.
I wish I had gotten more done during week 6, but a lot of it unfortunately could not be helped. Week 7 I will spend more time trying to improve my current rig of Dr.Eggman, and will hopefully be able to make a start on Sonic as well.