Armour Rigging Update

Learned a lot about skinning and rigging the past week or so.

For the joints I just used a regular mesh that would deform properly with specific weight painting. The torso itself is just a mesh with a displacement map to show the plates. That bloody skirt though...

I spent days wondering how I was going to get it rigged properly. In the end a friend showed me a video tutorial on using Nurbs as the driving deformations in limbs. I was able to use this method to bind the plates to each line of the skirt, and have them deform pretty well. I didn't want to use physics, because I wanted complete control over how the skirt would move, and I'm pretty happy with this result!

Basically, each Nurbs cylinder has 22 sections, as there are 22 plates per layer in the skirt. Each section has a hair follicle in the approximate middle, which is where it will stay, no matter the squash and stretch that the Nurbs curve receives. Therefore, a joint can be parented to each follicle, and in turn, a plate can be parented to each joint!

The tutorial was done by a mister James Thompson, and can be seen at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDnaJZMeJdk&feature=youtu.be

Plate_WeightPainting

Skirt_Rigging_1

Skirt_Rigging_2

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Skirt_Rigging_4

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