So I took my character Abalon into blender and began creating bones now a normal rig would not have a couple of these extra bones I have created however because of the unique nature of the character I had to add in extra bones to control certain things.
Unique bones were added in the middle of the torso, two extra ones for the shoulders however one of them is not used for anything, one for the elbow and one for the wrist unlike an organic rig that can stretch and deform in on itself my character does not have anything that would allow this except in the neck and thigh area that have springs.
Each bone has its unique name including the fingers that are not named Index1,2&3 rather they are named Metacarp, Proximal & Distal the actually names for these body parts its less confusing for me.
The claw arms on the back of my character also have some extra bones and as for all the extra bones in this character they are to control a certain axis rotation since I have not used ball joints for all of my joints.
To control the location of the bones down to the millimeter I translocated the scene’s Origin point to the exact parts of the of the body to them tie that parts origin to the world origin to get it perfect so that it would then rotate around that part with no clipping or issues other than the obvious since the bones have not yet been limited to certain rotation limitations.
Following the bone creation all I had to do was make each part of the body 100% weighted to each of the corresponding bones but somewhere I made some mistakes and Had to make some corrections here and there such as the left elbow Pin being connected to the right foot I’m not even sure how this happened but it did and there was a few more instances like this mostly down to the rear claw arms I had to completely fix there weight paints.
After I had the basic character rigged I bent all the joints into some quick poses of two androids fist fighting just to see how the joints and bones worked and to see if there was any issues and of corse there was a few but mostly relating to not having any limits on rotation yet.
Once I had fixed all the weight paints and saw how my bones where behaving I set about adding in some limit rotation constraints to the bones so that when I come to animate the character I cant over rotate the bones and I know what your thinking this is a robot so it should be able to rotate its bones 360 degrees and while that’s true for most of the joints its not very practical to have every axis able to do this so most of the bones are limited to where they will clip into the rest of the body parts the only ones able to over rotate are the ones designed to do it while I was creating the character.
So I knew my original textures were not very good the red and black were way too dark and not very attuned to my character’s story so I aimed to change it in my last post about textures I showed you what I had changed about the damage to Abalons body and there have been no updates since then in that regard however the colors of the Android are a different story so I took the references from before and put them into https://color.adobe.com/create/image To extract some color palletes from them however it seems that it was taking most of the colors from the background rather than the armor no matter which mode I set it to so I used photoshop to remove the backgrounds to get a little better result.
Using these pallets as inspiration I created a new color scheme that was more military in nature to make the character look more believable that they are a military android and I showed it to some people and they said it looked better than the original and without telling them what it was they all said it was a military robot which is more or less what I was going for.
Army Times. 2022. New body armor carrier, plates and female-focused designs headed to soldiers. [online] Available at: <https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/06/08/new-body-armor-carrier-plates-and-female-focused-designs-headed-to-soldiers/> [Accessed 16 February 2022].
Critiques, F., ZingZong, 2022. Sci-fi suit (WIP). [online] Blender Artists Community. Available at: <https://blenderartists.org/t/sci-fi-suit-wip/630156> [Accessed 16 February 2022].
Pinterest. 2022. Mahmoud Amghar – Cyrax vs Sektor | Armadura corporal, Armaduras, Ciberpunk. [online] Available at: <https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/232709505719304455> [Accessed 16 February 2022].
Pinterest.co.uk, Special Force, Stefan Celic, 2022. [online] Available at: <https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/578220039663716687/> [Accessed 16 February 2022].
Pinterest. 2022. Pin on Armors. [online] Available at: <https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/319051954848549842/> [Accessed 16 February 2022].
Pinterest. 2022. Welcome to Delta(private RP) – PMC outfits | Combat uniforms, Combat gear, Special forces gear. [online] Available at: <https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/785807834970129055/> [Accessed 16 February 2022].
Pinterest. 2022. Armour Design by Bobot073 | Sci fi armor, Armor concept, Sci fi concept art. [online] Available at: <https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/514465957430623054/> [Accessed 16 February 2022].
The Expanse Wiki. 2022. Martian light armor. [online] Available at: <https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Martian_light_armor> [Accessed 16 February 2022].
The Expanse Wiki. 2022. Goliath powered armor. [online] Available at: <https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Goliath_powered_armor> [Accessed 16 February 2022].
