Character Development - Little Girl (Continued)

Rigging

Now onto the rigging stage. Created a basic skeleton based on the shape of the character sing the Joint tool in the Animation Menu. Had to name each joint according to their original position. Like the mesh, I worked on one half of a skeleton then used the Mirror Joint Tool to create the rest of it instead of having to do the other side manually, otherwise both sides of the character would not be the same and therefore would not link up with the mesh when I have to bind them together later on.

Once all the joints were produced to form the skeleton for the character, I binded it to the main mesh by selecting the main joint first, then the mesh and then selected Smooth Bind from the Skin section in the Animation menu. But of course, adjustments to the "skin" had to be made so that it moved appropriately around a certain joint so I used the Paint Skin Weights tool to make the skin surrounding a particular joint move and change shape when a joint was used.

As mentioned, I labelled each individual joint according to its position and purpose. Then when it came to using the Mirror Joint tool, I used the option of replacement names to name the duplicated joints (i.e, left_elbow - right_elbow) instead of having to name each one manually.

When it came to making controls to move the joints during the animation progress, I simply used NURBS primitive circles and assigned one to each main joint such as the arms, legs, neck and head, altering the shape of one nurb circle for the head decisively. 

Hypergraph Input/Output. Making sure everything is connected according to preferences.

Instead of using Nurb shape controls for the knee joints, I decided to use the IK Handle tool for both legs as it would allow me to move a leg from the foot to the hip like an actual leg would. It does this by using a chain that includes an end effector, this is the end of the IK handle. When the IK is moved, the solver uses the position and orientation of the end effector to rotate the other joints in the IK chain accordingly.

Testing the IK handles out.  

The entire skeleton is almost complete and ready for animating but the rest of the character is not quite finished. Still need to parent several of the assets to the Main Control shape (a huge arrow where the girl's feet are), making sure that everything works and no errors are shown. 

Of course, now that the character mesh is settled, I have to now do the dress using two suggested methods. The upper part of the dress, I did use a nCloth node to make it simulate like real life fabric but it did not have the desired effect with the character so I scrapped the idea and used the Smooth Bind instead, using the Paint Skin Weights tool once again to make it change shape along with the joints. 

But I did use the nCloth node for the skirt of the dress, altering the control features to change the simulation including mass, stretch resistance, compression resistance and collision. Then selected the character mesh and assigned a passive collider so that when the girl moved her legs or interacted, the skirt would react physically to the movement.

Of course, had to attach the skirt to the character, I parented it first to the main control shape and then I selected the vertices at the top of the skirt and the character mesh and went to the nConstraint menu to select component to component. So the end result is now the the skirt is attached to the bottom of the upper part of the dress so that when the character moved and the animation is played, the skirt would move and sway along with her.

Creating the passive collider on the character so the skirt could interact and react when her legs touch them.

One more thing to do is create hair for the character so I produced some hair curves with the CV Curve tool, altering the vertices to make them smoother if necessary. 

Once the style of the hair curves are positioned and done to satisfaction, I select all the curves and then the head of the character and select the Make Curves Dynamic option. This would create a hair system based on the curves used and allow them to move like realistic hair.

Then I created the actual hair by going to the nHair menu and select the Create Hair option. Simple enough so far, but I had to make sure that the hair system that I just created was selected in the option box so that the hair follicles would created based on the shape of the curves, otherwise the hair would come out all wrong. 

Once the hair follicles were created, there were a few that developed on the other parts of the body and the face so I had to all those in the Outliner box and delete them.

Now just had to alter the controls for the hair, including clump shape, hair width, the amount of the hairs created for each curve, the colour and shading and the collision modes. Tried the self collide mode but when it came to test renders, it caused problems by the hair jumping out all over the place. So had to undo that and just leave the collision mode as it is. But everything else works fine, just had to keep changing the clump width so that there were no bald patches that could be seen anywhere on the girl's head.

The girl character fully complete.

Finished model of the little girl character. Everything works, except the tests have shown that the hair systems tends to flicker every few frames or so. Have attempted to alter the controls for several tests, some better than others but do not have enough time to completely solve the problem so this is the best I can do at this time. May work on the hair system more in the future.