Continuing my character modeling study, this time with Palla from Fire Emblem Shadows of Valentia.
 | | Character sheet |
Along the way I decided to try my hand with rigging, and then almost immediately gave up and went to Mixamo to see if my modeling was clean enough that the AI can rig it itself. And it did!
Because you can't tell the AI what each object is and is supposed to be, I had to take off the shoulder pads and sword and then add them myself to the rig manually, so they would remain stiff and not bend along with the automatic weights placed by the AI.
Then I also played around with ad-ons to automatically move with the rig, such as Spring Bones and Wiggle Bones. This was mostly used for the back of the hair.
A lot of people seemed to recommend Wiggle Bones, which no matter what I tried ended up just freaking out with the physics and crashing, so I ended up using Spring Bones and it turned out to be a lot more simple.
Moving on I also wanted to make the dress hem move a bit, so I used Blender's built in cloth simulator. It wasn't too difficult, though you do need to pay attention to clipping objects and the ones that interact with the cloth.
Later when looking over the animation, I also manually added a few face shape keys so she would feel a bit more alive and not constantly stare into the distance creepily.
Overall I am pretty pleased with the end result. |
