Link - Need advice to progress. CC Welcome.

HellishBaroness

As of posting this, I have finished the mesh and UVs. I plan on rigging this then posing, sculpting, texturing and rendering this character.

I had a fairly smooth time modeling him, but now I'm at a the rigging stage. This is one of my greatest weaknesses. I created the skeleton, but weight painting is something I can't just jump in and do.



I would appreciate critique of my work so far, and advice on how to approach weight painting. Should I save this model for later and practice on something simpler?

Alex_J

What trouble are you having with weight painting? Can you be more specific? IMO, building a skeleton and controls is way more complex than weight painting. 

HellishBaroness

I don't know why, but I just can't wrap my head around weight painting. Building the skeleton and controls comes more naturally to me. I've tried in Maya and Blender, but I never get it looking good. My last attempt on this character was using edit mode, but I didn't see any improvement.

Alex_J

Weight painting is pretty simple, though it does take a bit of practice to get decent results from it. I think explaining weight painting is more a technical talk subforum type of thing -- however my advice about that would be to just find some tutorials, there is plenty of them out there. If you don't get it from one, try another. If you can get some basic animations to test your rig out with, thats a great way to evaluate your work.

If you've completed everything else with this character, absolutely no reason you should get hung up completely at weight painting. So, hang in there, keep trying, you'll get it. And when I say keep trying, I mean, keep finding all the instruction you can, and paying real close attention to it. Trying to reverse engineer anything new is going to be a fools errand unless your like, a very stable genius. And once you do get a hang of the basic premise, don't try to spend forever getting it right on the first few goes. Just do a quick job and test things out -- you'll get a better understanding that way and avoid undo frustration.

About the character, you may want to relax his expression to a more neutral position before going forward. That way you could feasibly give him a wider range of emotions without work to correct back to a default idle expression. 

I'm not a big Zelda fan, so I might not be aware of some important details, but is the tip of the sword being flat a mistake? And, a slight bit of curvature to the shield might be a nice look worth checking out. Maybe itts the camera angle but it seems almost like a flat plane to me.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Alex, it's cuz the photo got clipped.  That's why it looks flat.

Costume looks boring.  Could use some artistic personal touch to bring it more interesting forms.  Think chainmail shirts, gambesons, etc.