Rigging the Models

When rigging the character i tried to keep in mind that it was designed as a game character, as such i used no blend shapes, and a simple face rig.

The Pipeline i used for this is 

-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.

High Poly model posed in maya viewport.

The same rig was taken and added to the low poly model, this was done to save time, though i appreciate that on a platform that requires such a low poly count and texture limit my rig could be too elaborate.

The facial controls do not work on this rig as the eyes and mouth are not moveable.