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Since I got way in over my head with the last project trying to make it overly detailed without a better understanding of how to do such things I honestly didn't know what to do next but after a day or 2 thinking about it I decided on Rigging something I did back in Maya which during that particular project I ran into numerous roadblocks trying to complete it so I wanted to see how my skills had improved since switching from that program.
The first thing I decided to make was thanks to a Tutorial by (Imphenzia) on youtube on how to make, rig and animate a quick Mech it seemed like a decent tutorial to get used to the way bones work and since it was a very simple rig it was the perfect starting point.
The rig was very simple a head and torso bone 2 arm bones, 2 leg bones and a foot however the leg had a IK attached to it for basic movement the design of the mech was totally random and leaved much to be desired but in the end I got it working and the first Mech was completed.
Once I had finished the first Mech and begun to understand basic rigging I threw away the tutorial and only came back to it once or twice to remind myself when I forgot something.
But I began making another Mech using what I had learned but I added a bit more complexity to it which did pose one or two issues later on mainly because the Mech I was making had a Ik for the arm as well as the leg.
At this point I still didn't understand what I was doing enough to make the geometry of the Mech work with the bones since I was not making a organic rig but I still continued to create the look of the Mech even without that understanding and To be honest it looks terrible XD but I didn't mind.
After quite some time making the Mech's design I added a color scheme to it which looks even more ridiculous that I was going for but I'm not so great at such things.
Anyway it was here after I had finished creating the Mech where I saw all my problems arise since I had not created the geometry of the Mech to compliment the bone structure everything was coming apart at the seams quite literally which looked quite silly and not to mention that terrible quickly slapped together walk cycle but I think I leaned what it was that I needed to fix and with that information I moved on to Mech #3
With Mech #3 it was actually an accidental idea and I actually had the idea when I was in the middle of Mech #2 it came when My dog came into my room and I was just staring at him and kinda had the idea of why dont I make a Quadruped instead of a Bipedal and the bone structure's was quite similar to that of the bipedal but insted it had four legs so 4 leg Ik's
I first started by creating one of the legs so that I could duplicate it to the other three then came creating the body and I kinda got lazy halfway threw and just mirrored it front to back as u can see in that screenshot however I did tweek it so not fully lazy :3
I will apologise for these renders I believe I rendered it at a few frames into the animation so its kinda floaty XD but this was the final look of the Mech and the color scheme is the same as the previous one so no improvement. (use the slideshow)
With the third Mech I didn't want to do a walk cycle and so I chose to do a Jump instead which turned out pretty damn awful but oh well I kinda did the third Mech for fun anyway I didn't use are references for any of these animations so... my bad
After making all these Mech's I decided to move onto something more organic which means making a more organic Rig and such but before all that I tried a little experiment which means I needed a mesh to use so I borrowed one from Christoph Schoch who you can find on twitter at (https://twitter.com/artstoff) the mesh I borrowed was that of Ruby Rose and it did come rigged? I think? Okie I didn't understand any of it so I Just deleted it and made the Mech Rig I had been using up till now which was all fine and dandy till I tried to pose her...
Sorry I butchered your mesh Christoph :') but anyway as u can see it does not work for a number or reasons the first is obvious 0 weight painting I had control over the mesh but it deformed so much and stretched the polygons another reasons it didn't work it because of the blatant clipping nothing moved with the mesh even though they are parented to the mesh which I now know u need to parent them to the bone and even weight paint them if necessary but since this was an experiment to see if it works or not I'll call it a sorta success.
Now that I had some basic understanding it was time to tackle a actually organic rig and weight paint it to work better than all the rigs I had done thus far and to start I wanted to make my own mesh to get better at box modelling I think to be honest not sure but I needed a reference to start so I used one that D-Man3D (https://twitter.com/blender_d) sent to me since they were using to sculpt i thought I could use it to box model however either I'm just stupid or there not aligned 100% correctly I'm probably just an idiot.
So you might find this a little weird but I created the mesh with sections so it has separate parts for the Knees and Elbows so when its sub divided it looks weird as hell but even not I don't think I was wrong when I did this because I could see where those parts where and when I connected it all together I could add extra geometry to the knees, elbow and neck since it would need it to bend with less problems.
I eventually connected everything but the Fingers and foot and the topology was actually looking okay better than I have done in the past thats for sure but could do with many improvements I was not going for perfection and didn't want to spend days making it since it was in the end a learning tool.
To say adding these in created quite a few problems would be not as dramatic as it actually was I had to reduce the amount of polys in the foot but I didn't mind since I didn't need a proper looking foot and as for the fingers that was a lot of tweaking to get it to look somewhat passable but in the end they both got attached and I moved onto Rigging it all.
Before Rigging it though I added in some extra detail to the chest area to represent cleavage and to the back to represent a spine I guess I also tweaked a lot of areas to make it work better overall then I went a step further and created clothes by selecting areas, separating those from my mesh and using the solidify modifier to expand those areas into clothes then I colored the clothes black and made the rest skin colored for extra flare which does not look so bad in my opinion I kinda like it other than the baldness XD I was gonna make hair but...
From here on out all tutorials that I used were thanks to Royal Skies LLC on youtube and they where a great help to making this project a success or as successful as it could be.
The first rig I made for this mesh was an experiment with double joints and weight painting and it did not go as planned the leg I posed ended up looking like sausage jelly a weird thing to be for a knee so this was not going to work.
However the second revamped version of the Rig was spectacular equipped with better bone placement, a better spine and better finger bones this was the Rig I was gonna work with to weight paint and now I will be honest automatic weight paints where applied and I then tweaked what needed to be tweaking in which I learned how weight paints work with better understanding that I previously had.
The shoulder was one of the biggest issues I ran into and I tried to fix it but I think my geometry/topology was also at fault where the arm connects onto the body. other issues included twisted arms fixed with bone constraints and drivers and such.
Such as this twisted hand where I needed to tweak a constraint to fix it ;3
The project was going swimmingly and I had just started animating a walk cycle when a Death flag popped okie thats a silly reference for blender died a simple fix wouldn't you think just restart blender and open the project again Wrong the project had become corrupt so I backtracked to a few saves before the last one still wouldn't open I then kept backtracking till the last one that would open 50+ saves ago at which point I noticed the issue.
Blender for some reason I have no idea why or how deleted my mesh and armature from the outliner I don't know how or why it happened but it no longer existed although it did exist in the scene which is very weird no amount of appending, importing or copy pasting fixed this every time I would try to open the project file it would crash if I tried copy pasting it from one file to another it would crash Its as if there was no data on either object even though I could edit the mesh and armature and make changed as I pleased. ( I reported the bug not sure if what I explained will help them though)
Anyway I can't continue I would have to go so far back and I simply dont want to I've learned what I wanted to so I will move on Maybe to animation using a mesh I downloaded for free thx to Royal Skies LLC :3
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