Weight Painting // Custom Attributes (Alien)

After the character was bound to the geometry, it was time to start weight painting. Weight painting took me a while to understand in terms of which parts of my geometry needed influence and vice versa. After asking relevant questions and doing a bit of researching it became understandable. Once I got the hang of it, it became an enjoyable task. 

-I flooded all the influence on the end joints such as the fingers, the toes, the jaw end, the left and right brow, the left and right eye, the head end and finally the root joint. After this I begun repainting in the positive influence on the jaw end. 

fig 1

Fig 1 shows weight painting of the jaw, this makes the deformation around the mouth look natural when the subject is animated to talk.

-After weight painting, I begun creating custom attributes on the controllers. These were to control the fist, peel heel, toe tap, stand tip etc. These attributes are very helpful when it comes to animating, they make the work flow much faster. This also helped me detect the joints which needed more painting. For instance every time the heel peeled, the was geometry being pulled, this gave me a clear visual of where I needed to paint. 

fig 2

fig 2 shows the process of creating a custom attribute on the fist by setting driven keys. Set driven keys gives me an opportunity to load the driver (controller) and the driven (joints), by this I can set the keys at the values I want.

fig 3

Fig 3 is the peel heel attribute and it's numeric value at 10, that is the maximum the character can peel the heel from the surface. 

-The process of creating these attributes takes a bit of time to get the hang of it, I'm looking forward to doing it for my Robot as it will help a great deal.