Collaboration work
I was very excited about this collaboration with second year student, Ben. So after the list published, we got in contact soon.
He showed me his work and it was really amazing and a interesting. There is a characters inside, he also is in the phrase of modeling and rigging. So he let me help him with the modeling and rigging of his character. After I accomplish the modeling and rigging, he can group the hand with his body easily.
However, he asked me to use c4d to do his work, I have never used it before and it is a good opportunity for me to learn this c4d.
To begin with, I needed to do the modeling of the hand, he then gave me some video of how to do it. I took them for reference and then try to do the modeling by myself.
It is quite hard though, the problem I met was, after I finished the rough model, the hand was not smooth, and however I adjusted every point, it was still not smooth enough. Thus, I used another software I was familiar with to help me smooth the hand, Zbrush.
After modeling, I came to a completely strange area, rigging. It was quite hard for me actually, The first problem I came across was the axis. Basically, all of the axis Z of parent joint should point to the child joint and all of the rotation of joint should be zero. I spent a lot of time on it, finally, after I viewed tons of tutorial videos, I found one way was that, there was a option named align in the command list. I just needed to select all of the coordinates, and click on that button, then every axis was on its direction.
After I finished the weight painting, I tried to set some animation systems, like the fist, bend of hand, bend of thumb, so that animator doesn’t need to adjust every joint one by one, if they want to let the hand become fist, they just needed to adjust the option of fist that I set, which was quite time-efficient! But only after I tried to do some animation, I found the drawback of my modeling, rigging! My finger was not fat enough and actually the bone of the thumb was not at the right position! So I needed to back to the first step, which means the weight I drew on every finger would be redo!
It was quite a nice experience for me, I learned how to do modeling and rigging in the cinema 4D, and also Ben gave me a lot of advice on both. I also collected some experience from mistakes I made, Every step in 3D modeling and rigging was important. I should check every step as careful as possible, in case after I done all, I should get back to fix something, which may cause some repeated work.