Anttilat

Rest of "hands on"-part of "The Essential Blender" ch. 7, rigging and skinning, is finished. Skinning was interesting and also a lot more frustrating than rigging.

Riggin, making the bones to the character, doesn't help much unless you attach them to the mesh, too. That part is called skinning. This is also the part where you start really seeing problems with your rig and where you need to make it work as desired.

All this was covered in mere five pages in the book. Also it was made very clear that there's several other ways to do this and apparently any of them would be better than this one. (At least if you want to listen to my husband who was stating clearly that he doesn't understand why anyone would do skinning this way.)

The book's way seemed to be quick and dirty. It didn't take much time to go through this part's basics, but the end result wasn't very good, either. Most of the work was scaling envelopes, or the areas around the bone that affect the mesh. Playing with the envelopes was fun at first as I could easily fix the biggest problems - like toes leaving behind when moving the rest of the leg. However, as soon as there was a problem that wasn't so easy to fix in this way it stopped being fun.

The chapter also very briefly introduced weight painting and I tried to fix some problems with it. Sure enough I did get some deformations fixed with this system, too, but others just stubbornly stayed. I have no idea why the elbow sticks out like you can see in the image below, or why Hank's butt doesn't deform nicely. But it's after midnight here so I'm leaving wondering these things until later.

Here's my little marionette:

I'm also itching to get to the next chapters (I have no idea what "shape keys" introduced in the next chapter is, but I know I want to learn more about materials and textures explained in ch. 9). So unless the discussion-part of this chapter helps with solving the skinning problems I'm probably just going to learn this properly later on like I decided with character animation.

I got feedback that I should have showed a better picture of the rig. So here's a clearer picture of the rig (which is actually skinned at this point, I just haven't posed Hank).