This week has been more productive in terms of work being made, although it hasn't been very successful. This week I deicded that I would prioritise the rigging for Sonic, considering he has rather uniaue proportions and would be used for an animation. I've been facing quite a few difficultues with this stage of production, given my little knowledge of the rigging process.
A lot of my difficulties came down to orientation, transformations and weight painting. I was able to get the hang of weight painting after some time, though I faced issues when it came to how the arms, orientated and how setting up IK handles either gives the wrong direction for arms bending or causes the forearm to rotate which is not what I want to happen. I plan to contact tutors for the final year project module who are located in the animation courses for advice on how to solve these issues, despite having looked up ways to fix them with no luck what so ever.
I setup multiple controls for Sonic, which when the rig starts working properly will help me both pose and animate this model more easily. I included the important body controls such as hands, feet, toes, chest, head and even some controls for the ears, eyes and spikes. As for the fingers, they use set driven keys in the hand set rotate the fingers on the Z axis to curl them inwards and outwards.
Whilst the rig isnt working the way I want it to currently, it was working well enough at one stage early on and was able to get an almost desirable pose from this stage of the rig, based on an existing Sonic render.
I was able to get some facial blendshapes made in ZBrush using layers, and exporting them to Maya as blendshapes. They do work on the model in Maya, albeit not perfectly. The solution might be to make sure the blenshapes only effect the facial area, which is what I'm going to try doing once I get the main body rigging and weight painting finished.
Whilst this week was filled with plenty of struggling in terms of rigging Sonic, I did make a little bit more progress on the environment. I implimented my dirt material along with a very basic grass material, which still needs a lot of work.
I redid the platform in ZBrush, retopologised it in Maya and baked out the high poly details in Marmoset. The palm tree was also using the same process, albeit baked out and textured in Substance Painter. The material on the tree is in a blocking out phase, and I may need to give it more geometry to better match the same shape as the high poly sculpt.
The island material uses a vertex colour to blend the grass and dirt into one material in order to paint the correct areas with vertex painting. I used this same method for my photogrammetry module last semester gained from a YouTube tutorial by underscore on YouTube. I also blended the high poly bakes of the normal map and ambient occulusion for the island base with the dirt and grass texture maps, to help retain the high poly info of the island.
As for this next week, I will try and get in contact with tutors with rigging experience to help point me in the right direction when it comes to rigging Sonic. Eggman on the other hand will need some topology adjusting when it comes to the zip on his jacket, and to be merged with the jacket itself. I may just continue to use mixamo for Eggman, whilst adjusting the weight painting afterwards.