Evaluation of rigging

Rigging

Rather than just adding a simple rig i wanted to try and create a more advanced rig for the model, one that could be used to animate it for a game, rather than just pose it.

I tried to keep the joint count relatively low, and i also didn't use any blend shapes so that a wider range of engines could be used. The main points in building the rig were

-Add skeleton

-Fix LRA

- Add Control Shapes and Joint constraints.

- Add IK handles to the arms and legs/feet

- Parent controls to affect the relative joints and other controls

- Weight paint the skin.

An important part of the rig is trying to maintain the shape of the armour, and i feel i was very successful in this. By looking at videos on digital tutors and youtube i noticed that additional joints could be used to "anchor" the armour polygons to the correct location and stop distortion.

The eyes and mouth also worked well because when adding the meshed together i made certain to maintain the separations in the mesh. 

The hands have set driven keys in for the index finger bend and the rest of the fingers/thumb, this sped up the process but still gave me all of the freedom i needed with the pose i used.

The skin painting was moderately successful, on the whole it worked well, but underneath the arm the leather strap still distorts quite a lot. I feel that this is more of a failure in my choice not to make them a separate object than that of my weight painting though, as that area moves a significant amount and it doesn't have enough edge loops. As i used the same rig on the low poly model, it probably has too many joints for use in a mobile game, but i did not have time to make a separate rig for it.

The Rig Applied to the High Poly Model

Posed High Poly Model

Rig applied to Low Poly Model