It's been a while since my last post and there has been a lot progress since then and technical progress at that.
Now my last post i was just finishing texturing. So we are at the rigging post.
Now when i first started this project i just wanted to skip through this parts (Modelling texturing and rigging) as quick as possible so i can animate and as long as i could makes the poses and the character is useable that's was all what matters.
Anyway since that first thought i have been a little more conscientious about the 3 stages and a need to do them right. Which means being a little more technical. something i feel i have benefited from and i do feel like i have level up in those areas.
You see my rig was going to be similar to that of my superhero character and just straight forward ik on the legs. But i got thinking about if i should try and have a go at a reverse foot lock for the character. After talking to few people who did the RJDM project they recommended that having a reverse foot lock on the character would benefit me. So i decided i would have a go.
After finding out how to create the rig for the feet and how the reverse foot lock works, i'm glad i took the time to learn the technique as i can see it will make things a little easier and i feel like i have learnt and achieved something worthy, that will help me in the future when it comes to rigging.
Also with the nature of my giraffes neck and how it squashes and stretches like a spring. I decided to put and IK on the neck so i can push the head down and then neck will curve. This will save time from having to move each joint in the neck separately and will still give me control over the neck. With having ik on the knees and neck i also added pole vectors to them to give me more controls and make them more manageable.
One thing i made sure i fixed after looking at my superhero rig was to put those extra bones in the finger tips also, so the fingers can bend right. I wasn't going to make that mistake again and hands are more important to this character and getting the hand placement to look nice.
Blend shapes and facial expressions aren't too important to this character but i given her one blend shape of "really happy" for when she really starts getting into the dance. Oh and she also has eyelids so she can blink and i can recreate the pose in the drawings. But this isn't done by blend shapes but by rotating the eyelid as objects.
Weighting hasn't been to bad for the character there's still a few tweaks needed but there is nothing major. Savanna Montanna is ready to dance and dance she will.
I have 5 weeks to animate and i aim to a decent 6 seconds of animation a week which will give me an extra week to just fine tune the animation.
