Over the past month or so, I’ve been pushing to devote eight hours per day to both my internship and FMP respectively. Though it’s been stressful, it’s been rewarding, and the quality of my work has improved so, so drastically since starting my position at the studio. Of course, it’ll be necessary to delve into this in an entirely separate post as I finally compose a few updates on my FMP work.
In the meantime, I took a break from FMP work for the past two days, as I was moving house, and in my free time I found https://www.models-resource.com/, a site to which models from all sorts of video games are uploaded. The Animal Crossing resources are extensive, and because it’s sort of a nostalgic comfort food for me- and because I sort of misinterpreted the task as potentially being easy due to the character’s simple shape- I decided to rig Blathers for fun.
I was excited to discover that the FBX file came with a pre-built joint skeleton, already skinned to the mesh, and assumed I’d be able to somewhat speedrun the rigging process. Unfortunately, I’d soon realize that most of the joints were not oriented the right way, which involved an hour or so of playing around with my JointOrient Mel script as well as manually orienting a couple to make sure that Y always faced out/up and X followed the path of the skeleton. In the end it was still a huge time saver that the skeleton already existed, but having to unbind the skin and re-orient the joints ended up being a bit of a step backwards anyway.
Another couple roadblocks that I hadn’t expected working with someone else’s skeleton was the fact that the original creator had not put a bend in the arms or legs, which resulted in my IK Handles not working correctly, and took me a while to figure out the cause of.
Two other minor learning moments were definitely my journey with painting the joint weights correctly on such a simplistic model, particularly the wings, as well as trying to figure out a workaround for how to toggle the regular eye vs blinking eye texture visibility on the same geo. I would prefer that the creator build the mesh with the “eye-cap” (as it’s listed in the outliner) a bit more smoothed into the mesh, or allow a way to toggle blinking, either through blend shapes or actual eyelids, because I ended up having to duplicate the geo, apply the blinking texture, then parent it to the neck control separately, then toggle visibility on the separate eye-caps.
I also built the beak joints and controls myself.
This project was a fun little break from my work, and helped me build upon and reinforce my rigging abilities, while also opening my eyes to how much more there is to learn. I’m mostly glad to have a rigged Blathers to play with, and it does make for a nice little clip for my showreel, though I’m unsure whether the animation comes off as strange/amateur to a viewer who is unfamiliar with the animation style Animal Crossing uses (which I was imitating, specifically Blathers’ waiting idle). Once I’ve got my FMP work ready to add to the reel, I’ll be able to evaluate a lot of my more recent, more advanced work and narrow down what should be included.