Week 9

Skinning

i decided to try using the skin modifier technique which i had tried in class.

the skin modifier assigns all the meshes vertices to the selected bones by using envelopes.

to set up the skin modifier it needs to be added to the stack first. next the add bones button is used to select the bones to follow. i used all the bones as every bone was needed for a fully moving body.

shows all the bones to be selected.

After connecting the bones the mesh follows the bones movement.

under the skin modifier rollout there are options for modifying different areas of the mesh; the most common would be vertices. after selecting vertices the envelopes are shown and vertex weights can be edited.

the screen after applying skin modifier and selecting vertex group. the left forearm envelope is selected.

once a vertex is selected its weight can be changed. this does not have to be done to all the vertices, just the ones which are weighted wrong. to try and find the correct vertices to edit, i placed the model in various poses and found out of place vertices. to edit the weights the weight table is very useful as it shows what bones each vertex is weighted to.

once one side of the model was weighted i used the mirror mode to copy the weighting to the right hand side. this is done by first selecting an envelope and then clicking mirror mode. next select all the vertices on the left hand side and then press either copy blue bones to green bones, or blue verts to green verts. in my case it was vertices.

mirror mode clearly showing the green vertices which would be given the blue (left hand side) weighting information.

the skeleton is now skinned correctly. the image above shows the character in a position where the leg is at an extreme rotation, however there are no longer any errors in the mesh because the weighting is now correct.

Texturing

To texture the model the Unwrap UVW modifier was used. this works by making a UV map, which can be edited for easier texturing.

above is the texture map. the eyes (spheres) have been enlarged and moved to allow for higher resolution on the pupils. the upper body was unwrapped separately using back/front mapping, as the front and back of the characters vest are slightly different.

above is the texture. as the character is simple the painting did not have to be very careful.

the final textured character.