Motion

Over the past few days I have been sorting out the YMCA characters motion.

I have been having trouble making the motions seem natural. Even though the model is rigged very similar to a human there are still several areas that are different making it that little bit harder to rig. One of the areas is the shoulder, here the shoulder and arm are not connected the neck and spine so have to moved slightly differently. Another area being the knees, due to the ‘A’ having the bridge across the middle I had to devise a way for them to correctly bend. I eventually decided the knee should bend below the cross bar.

To solve several issues of the mesh deforming in an odd manner I have been adding vertices around the joints to allow the mesh to deform a lot smoother.

Another of the problems was adjusting the weight of the effect each bone has over every vertex. Some of the shoulder vertices in particular were deforming in an unnatural way and I had to do several tests of changing the weight between the forearm and the shoulder until it began to look correct.

I think the model is now ready to be animated. The best test the model could get is for it to be used in a real animation and see if any issues arise so I am going to deliver it to the rest of the group and see how they get on with it. I am confident that if any further issues arise I can fix them on the fly in the individuals animation and then use information gathered there to update everyone else’s animations.