Good morning!
This week, I focused on creating a skeleton for the character. However, I started with touching up some texture details that went overlooked from last week.
I then moved onto rigging my character. Joints were placed and joined together into the scene as necessary to create the skeleton.
I then made sure all of the joints were oriented correctly, with the y-axis facing outwards and the x-axis facing the same direction as the joint. IK handles were applied to groups of joints as necessary to allow the model to bend properly.
I originally intended to create the physics of the coat through rigging, however this caused some errors in Mixamo’s pre-made animations. This could prove troublesome during integration. To fix this, I deleted the bones in the coat and seperated the coat from the rest of the model. It was then made into an nCloth instead, and I tethered the upper part of the coat to the inside of the model. However, the plus sign would either fall off or hold the coat up, depending on how it was attached to the simulated fabric. This also wouldn’t export from Maya to Mixamo properly even as an .fbx. I’ll be having a meeting with the instructor soon to discuss the best approach for solving this problem.
Afterwards, I’ll be creating a key frame animation to display the movement of the model. Animation should be done and submitted by this Wednesday. However depending on how the development plays out, I may delay it to allow fine-tuning of the animation.