Rigging and Weight Painting

The rigging process for Gloria was quite simple as nothing really differed from the alien exercise I had previously completed. The only major change was adding more joints to her hands as she had been modelled to have 4 fingers and a thumb. I had to adapt the rig slightly as our character was more stylised and her coat affected the way her shoulders would move compared to a human. For this I had to move the shoulder joints down further than they normally would and the clavicle joint I ended up hiding as it wasn't until the weight painting began did I realise it would affect the model quite drastically if I left them on. The clavicles ended up deforming the geometry too much and I found it easier to weight paint just the shoulders. If I could have used the clavicles it would allow more breadth of movement. The reason why I hid the controllers so you wouldn't be able to move them was because I did a lot of weight painting at that point and didn't really have the time to go back and unbind the skin to delete them.

Initially I was going to create dynamic chains for the coat so they would move with the legs in a fluid and natural movement. To do this I created joint chains that went down the sides and front of the coat, created curves that followed the joints and used the nHair system in Maya to make the curves dynamic. I then had to group and parent them in a certain order and create a sphere to go round each leg. This sphere would act as a collider (when made to collide) and stop the legs from going through the coat. I got the process correct however when it came to moving it I had a lot of issues. For one the coat geometry would never return to its original place and also found that it deformed far too much even after weight painting - as seen below.

To overcome this I had to compromise by just having the coat bound to the skeleton like the rest of the body. The coat would still move with the legs, however it wouldn't be as much of a fluid motion and because of the low poly model and the weight painting, if the leg moves past a certain point it would penetrate the geometry. The image below shows how the leg moves with the coat when bound. It took me awhile to weight paint it correctly, mainly because I duplicated the coat to overcome the backface culling issue within Unity. However by doing this I placed it too close to the outside of the coat which made weight painting a nightmare. In the end I deleted in inside part and it was a lot easier to do, so when it comes to putting it into Unity I will just change the coat shader from diffuse to the soft occlusion leaves shader which projects the texture through the geometry and you can't not see through it.