How do I rig/Skin this??

PixelApocalypse

Hey people,

I've made a character for a cinematic we are working on for school. This character has a lot of belts running along his body though. http://puu.sh/nxQuT/9879ea93c7.jpg
We are going to use motion capture for the animation and i'm checking how the deformation is working on my control rig. This is proving an absolute nightmare to skin though. http://puu.sh/nxQyq/36e1fc0080.jpg
because not of these belts are part of the same mesh (all seperate objects but combined) There is alot of intersection going on. http://puu.sh/nxSGQ/0dc3bc611f.jpg http://puu.sh/nxSIy/e56ed633d0.jpg

How do I approach this in terms of skinning. Can this all be done with skinning weight painting and using the component editor? Or do I need use cloth simulation somehow?

Cheers

CharacterCarl

I'd suggest you separate the belts/straps from the body. That way you can copy the weights from the body to the belts/straps and don't necessarily have to paint them by hand.
You'd do this by:
1. Separating the belt geometry.
2. Skin Bind the separated geometry.
3. Select body, then belts then Skin->Copy Skin Weights.

Then you can continue to refine the weights by hand. It would've been wise to have the edge loops of the different geometry layers overlap so that deformation produces less intersection. You can still try wrap deformers but it will most likely give you bad performance.

PixelApocalypse

For the big part of the body we have actually since decided to use displacement mapping. This so it's much easier to skin the body. Have very little time left to skin this properly unfortunately.