Because I do not take Character animation and have no knowledge of character rigging, modelling and animating that left me with having to find my own resources and teach myself how animate a character. While it isn't required of me to animate a character I really wanted to include it in my animation not only to get more experience but because It's something that I've always been interested in, so much so that I enjoyed modelling my character more than the objects for my environment. While I enjoyed modelling the character I enjoyed the process of rigging and skin weighing less so, while it wasn't horrible I don't have much experience with it so it took me a while to get the hang of it and I found myself having to create new joints in places I wouldn't expect. Creating the rig for this model took a while for me as this was my very first attempt at doing anything like this however I did watch varies tutorials surrounding it and have some people taking the character animation class to send me some of the videos so I don't get too behind.
The video that I most clos
ely followed when going through this process was a video by James Taylor that went through the process of rigging and skin weighting (something that I had never heard of before watching this video). One of the aspects of his video that I liked was the discussion around the placement of joints, and that most joints should be centred for example instead of placing the spine along the very back of the model its instead better to place it in the centre of the model, things like this I had never heard of and allowed me to better understand rigging. Another tutorial I followed focused around the modelling of a more stylised, cartoon-like character which is the same style as my character. While James Taylor's tutorial around rigging was very important, I wanted to get an idea on how people rig characters with more exaggerated proportions like my character, and how these rigs differ from a character based heavily on reality like a person.
When rigging my character I mainly focused on aspects such as the hand and head because I'm not moving much in my scene, all the action in my scene is a simple head tilt and the movement of a pencil, nothing to complex. So to not waste to much time on this process I dedicated most of my time to these parts of the body neglecting the bottom torso. While below the torso is rigged I have not painted on any skin weights or made any significant alterations apart from applying joints and binding it to the skin.
Overall though I am happy with the outcome and hopefully next year I can focus solely on creating character models as I find it much more enjoyable.
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