Last week, I completed the mermaid model, and this week, I will complete the small octopus model and rig both models.
I did an almost perfect job of recreating the design of the baby octopus. Although the shape of these eight legs does not look particularly flexible and is slightly sharp, it looks even cuter when the little octopus curls up its legs. This design also adds some unique charm to it.
Rigging:
This week, I devoted almost all of my time to boning the character, which was both a huge challenge and a learning opportunity. The process of character binding is very complicated and involves many technical details. To ensure that the movements of the two characters are natural and smooth, I paid particular attention to the production of joints. After trying it out many times while watching the tutorials, I finally settled on a method that maximized movement.
Mermaid：
Octopus：
Challenge & Reflection：
The process of binding bones is more tedious. The biggest challenge is that I’m not skilled in using ADV as a plugin to bind bones, and I tried to add IK joins to the hair, but it didn’t work well.
I learned a lot from this and realized that I still need to improve at binding bones, but the ADV plugin considerably sped up my rigging.
To get the best results from the joins, I asked some friends to check them for me after I finished making them, and the final result looks like this.
But in this rigging, I used a lot of what I learned in the first semester in the robotic arm, such as the ability to add various controllers via add attribute and so on, which can be an excellent way to achieve simplicity.
The tiny octopus model, I think, is actually a bit of a pain in the ass. After all, it has eight legs, each requiring three bones to support. This allows for more flexibility in controlling the octopus’s legs, and one must always be careful not to let the model wear through. And, because the octopus is a mollusk, I added two controllers to the head to get better deformation. I added Jiao’s attribute to the chest controller to make it more convenient to simultaneously shrink the whole octopus into a sphere.
Next week’s plan: I’ve revised the model many times this week because I wanted to maximize the model’s mobility, and each time I encountered a new problem, I didn’t have enough time to do it, so I’ll divide the UV cutting and mapping into next week’s work.