Game Creation - Rigging and Animating

Rigging

The rigging process was where all my problems started.

I rigged and skinned boris when suddenly my textures fell apart.. After messing around with the UV's I was able to save him but it meant his hair was skinned separately to his body, for some reason the textures all became offset because of the hair texture which wasn't grouped to the main body UV's.

I watched tutorials on IK and FK switching and none of them were helpful to me at all, I thought I could switch by turning off IK blend. But turning that off caused the whole IK rig on the arms to collapse so It had to be deleted. He only has IK's on his legs that I don't dare touch anymore...

Overall it was so difficult learning this process solely with tutorials. The tutorials were patchy, the only one that covered the whole process did IK and FK switches that I didn't understand, I only wanted an FK rig yet nothing existed to me. Tutorials also aren't helpful when you have a problem, they don't describe where you are going wrong. Like Boris' co-ordinates are all wrong, one side of his body is - the other + when he moves, yet when you FK move the same body part either side they move accordingly..? When technically they shouldn't. The worst part is, I have no idea where I went wrong in the process!

I'm looking forward to starting college again and being able to talk to someone and find out the issues of where I went wrong, and get a nice solid tutorial on one of the hardest parts of Maya.

Animating

Surprisingly considering how many issues I had with the rigging, the animating of Boris went well.

I could tell there was issues with rigging though because of the graph editor being nonsensical, lines everywhere..

But I managed to create the basic movements I needed and made them looking nice!

This is the run cycle;

and the jump cycle;

I really enjoyed animating Boris. I just felt that I wasn't doing it right, or correct for that matter, because of the issues with the rig that became evident in the graph editor.