Serious help with rigging / skinning!

LuckyNinja

Hi everyone, I'm in serious need of help with rigging / skinning. I need to learn it for university, yet I've followed the tutorials the lecturers have put up, I've looked at so many tutorials on youtube, and yet I still can't get the hang of it.

My limbs deform horrifically whenever they move, and I've tried weight painting it all and I still can't make them look good. I've attached the file I'm working on so you can see the problem better. The arms band horrifically in the pits when bending downwards, and just plain go nuts when going back / forth. The legs bend like absolute nightmares.

Please, if anyone could help me figure out how to solve the skinning issues, I would be so incredibly grateful!

Many thanks, L


Link to download: http://www.sendspace.com/file/ymkfi4

Bartalon

For the other viewers: The link is to a 3ds Max file.

I'm a Maya guy so I can't help. Sorry!

rino

i'd suggest posting wireframes of the model and rig. not everyone is going to download the file and also not everyone can open it.

LuckyNinja

Okay, I've made an imgur album that demonstrates some of the problems

http://imgur.com/a/KtQ9J

monster

I'd say your progress is good. But it's going to take a fair amount of work to fix it up.

1. Don't include the clavicle (shoulder) in the IK chain. This one change improves things quite a bit.

2. Thick joints like the knee will always be hard to work with. You could try adding another bone at the knee that is position constrained to the knee, but orient constrained 50% to the knee and 50% to the thigh. And add that to the skin modifier. This will keep the joint from crushing in, but it will still clip quite a bit.

3. Your skeleton isn't optimal for a game project. And areas like the spine are just messy. There's too much to go over, so I made a quick skeleton as if it was going into one of my games, but in general use less bones.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2904948/Tutorials/Uni-LeoDeform03.max

4. Your skinning is suffering from a poor skeleton. You have one bone called ChestCenter and another called connectBone001 that are competing for the same verts. Skin's Mirror Mode doesn't work because the left/right bones are not aligned. I changed the unweighted color to black in the preferences. It helps identify problems quickly. Here at the shoulder you have a gap in weighting. This will always look bad.



5. Your model is symmetrical, but off center. The center line of the model isn't lined up with the grid. This also breaks Skin's Mirror Mode.



6. Put the model's feet on the grid. When exported to the game the ground plane will be at 0 on the Z axis. You don't want to start animating in the wrong location.

Really I would start over by fixing the problems with the model first, and then building a better skeleton.