Following on from the last post I have made massive progress towards completing this project however there are a few things I got hung up on or was not able to complete mostly due to lack of knowledge in the subject area but they were the most advanced things anyway and one of those things required a certain partial knowledge of programming.
Before I start all my writing I’d like to thank Royal Skies LLC who you can find on YouTube for all the videos he has on Rigging, Weight paints, Drivers Etc as they are what I have been using to try and understand it all and they have been a massive help and in my last few posts I have mentioned his channel but not thanked him so :3 thank you
Okay let’s start off where the last post ended which was just before starting retopology and that was actually quite easy especially because my mesh did not have any face on it so I didn’t have that complication and I actually retopologized it quite quickly starting from the head and working my way down following the FlippedNormals tutorial on basic retopology and the tools to do so are quite quick and amazing so within around an hour I had already got down to the pelvis and making the breast topology which actually was quite easy although I had to go back to sculpt mode to add in a quick Nipple so I had an endpoint for my breast topology otherwise I didn’t know where to end it.
Link to the original post on WIX: https://taminaionanimation.wixsite.com/taminaion/post/female-mesh-completed
I was actually quite shocked how quick and easy it was to retopo everything aside from the hands and feet which I would do later and spend more time on but the new mesh was not perfect by no means as I had to tweak a lot of areas later especially that terrible pelvis area where the legs connect but I was quite happy since this was by far the best mesh I have made up till now and I’ve only made a few up till now anyway so I’m quite proud despite the look ;3
Next was retopoing and connecting the hand and feet to the mesh now this was not easy especially the hand which Is the only one I will show you as the feet where not as hard even if it has 1 triangle in it.
Now you must understand that I made the hand separate from the body since I did not sculpt hands and had to poly model them using a reference and once I had modeled the hands it came time to connect it to the body there where I had to convert 20 verts that were in the hand into only 13 that were in the arm so I had to work some magic to keep it in quads and that was the hard part since I could only cut it down to 12 verts neatly so I still ended up with 1 triangle which I moved towards the thumb so it would not cause any major deformation in the hand when it came time to animate.
Unsmoothed 
Smoothed 
Unsmoothed 
Smoothed 
Triangle Before Move 
Triangle After Move
But there were more triangles in the hand however these were good ones used correctly to get better movement in the knuckles or that’s what I think they are there for any way I’m still unsure.
Before I created my own rig I wanted to test something that may help when it comes to animation which was to add triangles in the knee to see if it would give better deformation so to test all of this I used Mixamo’s auto rigger and animation library.
I used 2 animations from Mixamo one was a rumba dance and the other a Naruto type run and I laid out all the videos the same on the left is the unedited mesh and the right is the mesh with the triangles in the knee and to be honest there was not a massive difference between the two. (also ignore the elbows I placed the bone in them wrong)
I learned that while in rendered view and u play an animation instead of it moving the physical mesh it moves the wireframe like this so you can still see the animation in quick time. (Nothing relevant to the project just thought it was cool)
I’m not 100% sure why I took this screenshot or why I numbered them I totally forgot but I think it was just me testing the basic rig with auto weights same goes for the rendered versions below this as well.
The next thing I tried is probably one of the most important when it comes to a female character/mesh since it’s only realistic to have it in there and that is to add in jiggle physics which I used an addon to achieve and that was spring bones however before I even tried to do that I needed to tweak the breasts with Weight painting so that it is only affecting the breast area.
Unedited Weights 
Unedited Weights 
Edited Weights 
Edited Weights
However this was not the best I mean it did work but I had to tweak it again later to be less red (1.0 Weight) and be more yellow-green (0.7-0.5 Weight)
once I had the weight paints in I did a quick test of the spring bones to see them in action using the default settings which looked awesome and then I tried to render it.
As you can see that did not go well as the breasts ended up being sucked into the body and it took me like 20 minutes to figure out that you have to BAKE the animation before rendering which I had 0 clues about so I learned something :3 and in the end, I rendered it out.
The next thing I tested was something called Pixar topology and I can see why it’s used but I have no idea why it didn’t work for me its most likely the weight painting which still puzzles me but I mean I did try everything I could think of to get it to deform better but I eventually just scrapped it although I think I still added it to the elbow cause I forgot to remove it.
As you can see I color-coded the Pixar topology in the pink deforms a little but not the way it should so I just scrapped it all so I think ill just leave this section as is and not explain more.
I tried my hand at making hair using curves thanks to YanSculpts tutorial on YouTube however I did not make it look good I was just testing it and when it came time to make it move with the head I was puzzled so I just connected it to the body mesh in the end.
Right so here is where its all going to get confusing and complicated or at least for me its all confusing and complicated because its all about expanding on the basic rig with correction bones, drivers, custom bones and new Ik’s but I’m going to simplify it all as much as I can for my own sake.
Right lets start with the hand as you can see something clearly is not right I mean its obvious but let me tell you why the hand has a correction bone (The Green One) and its to make the deformation of the hand when it moves left and right as well as up and down better using Drivers however the left and right worked but the up and down did this to my forearm and I did try fixing it but Tbh I did not understand it enough.
The next thing I want to mention was actually easy to understand and that was making a custom bone controller for the head tracking so wherever I move the large blue pointer the head will look and follow it which is nice ;3
I tried for the life of me to get the two correction bones for the hips working but as you can see they just won’t work and this screenshot was actually the best I had gotten the correction bones you don’t want to see the worst trust me.
Let’s talk about the giant blue arrow this arrow controls the chest and stomach area independently from the hips which is the large blue circle and this helps quite a lot.
Before I talk about the last thing I want to show you my rig as a whole the left side of the body’s controllers/bones where coloured in red and the right side green whereas anything that was not left or right where coloured in blue also the giant black rings is the master controller than moved everything at once.
The last thing is something that I am going to change since it’s not working as it should and that is that I added in a new Leg IK that has a toe pivot controller built in the green triangle is the pivot and as you can clearly see it’s causing a massive deformation when I move the leg IK and I tried to fix it damn I Try a lot of things to no avail but anyway I can’t fix it with my meager knowledge so Ill go back to a normal leg IK instead.
And I think that’s everything up till now after I fix the leg Ik I will do the animation challenges that I set myself and I think I will also try the same challenges with the Royal Skies LLC Female Mesh/Rig and put them side by side to see the differences maybe.
