After finishing my robot mode l the next thing to do was rig it up for animation. The first thing to do is create a 'core' for the robot. This will be the centre of gravity, the master node of animation.
Then we added more nodes, pressing P to parent them together. This is done so that if you moved the hip, the leg would move along with it. I ran into a problem with this, as I copied the left arm and neck over to the other side, it meant I had two neck nodes over the top of each other. It took a while to figure out how to fix it, but I eventually just unparented everything on the arm, deleted the extra nodes, then parented everything back.
This seemed to work, since I haven't had any issues since.
With the whole skeleton done, it was time to attach it to the body. This is done by going into the 'skin' menu with before the skeleton and mesh selected, and then clicking the 'bind skin' option. This now means that if you move a node, the part of the body should move as well.
This is what my node-map ending up looking like. The root is the master node, which controls all the others. This is done automatically when the nodes are placed. However, later on I had to do this same thing with nurbs to be able to move the model for animation.
For now, there was a new problem. The bind skin made it so that everything bent in strange ways when tested out. This is because it assumes it's working with organic/ human models when this is done.
It's easy to fix, because there is a menu called a weight map. By selecting each node, you can decide how much control it has over different parts of the model. For a human model, you'd want the movement to be smooth, so having this automatically done means you'd probably only need to change few parts.
For a robot, you need precise, rough movement. So I went through the weights and made sure everything was white. White means that it has strong control over the node, and if nothing else has white or other colours on it, that means that node is only controlling the white. I went through and made sure everything was white.
I ran into a strange problem with the neck of my robot, as it would refuse to be filled white. I eventually managed it, but for some reason it still twists in weird ways when the head turns. I wasn't sure what else to do, as this seems to happen even after I've fixed the problem. I decided to ignore it, as I had done everything right to this point.
Once the weights were done, I went into the nurb menu, and created a bunch of circle nurbs, and moved them one by one into place around the node points. This is to have control over my model when I go to animate. To make sure it would be easier to rig, I parented all the nurbs like in the diagram above. It made things a lot easier when I could shrink it down to one nurb.
All that was left to do was select the nurbs and nodes at the same time and link them together. I changed a lot of the animating settings for them while doing this, as the arms and legs can only move in one way. I also made the back completely straight, how it was in my design.
The last thing to do was organise my UVs. Before rigging, all I'd had was a mess of frames around in the box. I knew this had to change, so I went from one part of the robot to another, sizing things down and arranging them to look neater and easier to manage. Of course, before my whole model had been combined into one mesh before rigging, this was extra challenging. I managed it, however, and I'm proud of how neat it is now compared to before.
Overall, I think I did very well at rigging. Even though I ran into a few problems, I managed to get past them relatively quickly. I tried out posing my robot, and found it very simple. I know I will have problems in the animation part of things, as I have never done it before, however, I'm willing to try and change my model's rigging to make it easier if I have to.
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