Modelling and rigging, didn't really go how I expected it go

I first started modelling the head, starting off a similar manner as I created the last head I made for practice. This went fairly well. Because I followed some step by step videos on youtube I encountered little problems technical wise. I had some trouble creating the face exactly like I wanted it to, but when I created the body I still kept tweaking because when the head had a body beneath it I could see the proportions a bit better and realised I wanted the jaw a bit wider for it was a tad too slim to my liking.

I opened up a new file, imported the head and some reference panels and starting creating the body. I made it limb from limb, attaching it to the torso afterwards before merging the head to it. Every time I looked at it, something seemed a bit off but I couldn't put my finer on it so I good friend of mine offered to help me out through facebook. She has a good eye and a really good sense for proportions so with drawing over my original reference and screenshots she was able to help me out with this problem. I didn't really feel like creating shoes (ugh, lazy me) I imported an old character of mine, cut off its legs and altered the mesh a bit to make it fit better with this body and tahdah, shoes!

Then the next part: creating the skeleton. That wasn't all that hard luckily. Remembered it from last time what to do and what not to do, so that went fairly easily. I altered some stuff in the skeleton in the end because Mat is clever and was like: reverse foot is rubbish, here look at my skills. This is better. And HALLELUJAH I should never forget this because this is knowledge you'll need for life! When I wanted to bind the mesh to the skeleton I had a teeny tiny problem though.

 

This motherfucker.

This week wasn't really my week when it came to rigging the character. A lot of things that possibly could go wrong, all went miserably wrong. First the problem up here. I remember making a few mistakes creating the body but I really thought I deleted all the faulty faces and double vertices and such, turned out I was wrong. After three days of tweaking and cursing Mat came with the solution (I'm eternally grateful) Then I spent the rest of the friday painting the weights, which came it looking pretty okay I think.

Saturday I started on creating the controls for all the limbs and stuff. All fine and dandy, that went pretty good, until I encountered a little problem with the hand. 

That hierarchy though. And I'm not even there yet!

I think I must've mixed up various techniques on rigging the arms/hand because suddenly it started to look messed up. Clean rotation along the axes went okay, but when making a random rotation the hand was like ZAPOWWW. And I couldn't find the problem. I must add, my brain was probably pretty fried at this point because I kept making the SkinCluster disappear. over. and. over. again. I kept losing minutes and minutes of work because I then realised the bind was gone.

Oh well, back to the hand. I mailed Mat for some advice and he came up with a solutions (Danique what's that stupid control doing there? Get rid of it for it's causing the problem.) Great. All the work in creating attributes to the hand such as rolling up to a fist and such gone, but I couldn't be bothered to create them again in fear I would mess up again.

I fixed the problem this sunday, for Mat was really nice and helping me out on his free sunday (you're a saint, Mat) and AGAIN I kept losing the skincluster. AGAIN hours of work wasted. (get your shit together, Danique.) So after a little bit of crying and self loathing I just thought: just add a bit of colour to make it look more appealing and start creating the blendshapes the next week so I can hopefully start animating next weekend after BAF is over. I didn't bother much with uvmaps, except for the eyes and the shoes, and I probably have to unwrap the body though (I already did the head when modelling that, so yay me. For that's the most important part for the UVwrap since I want to try and at a bit of detail in the face if possible, the rest isn't that important in this model)

Now let's hope next week Maya will have a bit of mercy on me. It didn't crash though this weekend, does Mike perhaps have magic fingers? (knocks on wood) EDIT 20 november, I have cursed myself! But I do think do it's because of the image I wanted to load into the project, so maybe it was too much to ask. After I just stopped trying it went alright again.