Character Deformations

Once the Control Rig is ready I started the next level. Connecting the character's mesh to the bones was something I was a bit concerned about because to me it was something completely new but at the same time, it was something that I really wanted to learn because I would be testing the rig I had built and I would discover if it worked or not.

The first thing I did was not go straight to bind all the structure to the character, before that I created twist joints on arms and legs to allow a better deformation when rotating the limbs.

The twist joints have different rotations. For example, when rotating the shoulder more skin moves towards the elbow that's why the twist joints closer to the elbow must rotate more than the ones closer to the shoulder so when they are binded to the skin we get a more realistic result.

Elbow to hand:

Once the stretchy joints are done now it comes the time to bind the control rig to the character.

I learnt a lot when skinning the character, one of the most useful things I learnt was that you can use edges and vertices to aim the skinning to specific areas. Another thing I noticed was that the topology of the model is really important to get good deformations.