In the 02/05/19, we started to rig our robots on Maya. Before I get into this, let me just say that rigging became confusing at times for me and when Luca was demonstrating the steps on rigging, the pacing of demonstration felt fast for me sometimes.
The first step to rig our robot was to freeze and delete our robot's history. After deleting and freezing the history I created the joints from the root of the robot. Then I had constructed all the joints into a skeleton body itself. Afterwards, I had binded the skin of the robot and joints. So, the mode settings is: rigging (located in the top left hand corner of the drag and drop box) Then on the top bar go to: skin > bind skin. After the binding, I painted skin weights.
Honestly when I was at this stage I struggled a lot. I was doing many tweaks and I was adapting things. The paint and selecting on the other hand was fine but everything else was a mess. Before I get into more detail to how I was doing things I'm going to talk about influence.
In rigging terms, Influence practically influences the shape or movement of a rigged piece. To tell if something has been influenced are the skin weights. If something is white it will be influenced whereas black doesn't influence the shape. To put the colors into another perspective RGB can be used. Red is the color before white and Blue is after black. In a way it can maintain influence and match the inherit the realism from a life figure or give personification to a shape.
Back to what I was doing:
What I had to do was to add white skin weights to certain parts of the body that were labeled individually. One thing that made things faster was that I could do one side of the robot and mirror that influence to the other side.
Unfortunately on 09/05/2019 it got to the best of me and I wasn't in the best frame of mind to be honest so I tried to bear with it although in the end. I wasn't able to finish rigging the model due to the confusing process it was. Then on the 10/05/2019, I then got back into rigging my robot again. Only this time however SOMEHOW the painting and influences were all over the place when I had realized it. For example on the torso, the head had influence and on the left or right thigh the 1/2 of the foot had influence. It ended up being a weird process because I tried applying black to it with the color ramps although it wasn't able to replace the white with the black. Someone in the class said it was impossible to replace the white with the black itself.
On the 15/05/2019 I decided to attend a catch up session to get on with my rigging. All I needed to do really was to produce controls and IK handles. Personally I had followed my notes through and did it several times and I watched the video. I grasped some of it of what was going on but the way I was doing didn't go to plan. I made references for my match movement in the process. Not going to lie, on 17/05/2019, I adapted the references because the scale didn't seem accurate and correct to me. Had I tried Scaling the robot the skin and model itself would scale up and down and the joints would either remain the same or go out of sync. So I fixed this by adapting the robots scale and in my case I deleted the reference and added the reference again. For some reason the reloading wouldn't justify it.
Due to the confusions and time restrictions on my robot project. Luca had helped me out adding the IK handles and controls for the robot.
Technical issue with skin weight, Luca helped me with this and combined the robots elbow.
Was overall very tacky and technical to get it but managed to get it done in the end.
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