I've been working through the RIG course lately, and I realized there's a decent stretch where we build the rig, and since this isn't a one-and-done like some exercises, I wanted to share my progress as I was working through it!
08/11/2026, weight painting!
(This isn't the final result I swear! This is just the only screenshot I had while I was working on it.)
On this day I spent a lot of time working out the weights for the body. I did it for both the torso and the armor. (Though I didn't take any screenshots of that, whoopsie)
It turns out weight painting is a whole discipline unto itself! A big lesson here for me is that it's the actual deformations that matter, now how pretty the weighting looks. (I know, I know.)
08/12/2026, spine and head!
Wayne was NOT joking when he said the spine was a lot of work, but here we are! I actually adjusted the head control after the fact since it did clear the helmet, but I felt it could have been better.
08/13/2026 - Arm rigging!
I'm building out the full arm rig. Blowing it up and then attacking it piece by piece is wayyyy easier than whatever I was doing before. The intuition is also getting clearer as some patterns are showing up. I spent a solid 20 minutes figuring out what's going on with the FK hand and the FK hand MCH, so that was fun. :D
08/13/2026 - Arms complete!
I spent basically the entire day getting the arm rig done. Holy crap this was a lot! The script came in clutch for mirroring the drivers and the bone groups. After all of that work I really didn't want to have to think about it all over again. XD
But here we have:
- FK arms
- IK arms
- Arm tweaks
- A property bone on both sides to control the elbow pole parent, forward kinematics shoulder follow, the hand IK parent, the IK/FK switch, and the volume deformation
I had to test all of the functionality to make sure it was working, hence poor Luna being in that sorry state.
All in all I learned a TON here, and everything is kinda coming together. I still don't think I'd be able to recite it from memory, (yet), but the reasoning behind the bone structure is pretty clear to me now.
Buuut I'm exhausted. I'll continue with this course more tomorrow!
08/14/2026 - Palm controls!
I spent the morning knocking out the hand palm controls. I actually had a very fun time figuring out the shrinkwrap modifier for this one. I didn't realize I had to apply it, and I didn't realize the bone widgets addon could allow me to work in object mode, and, well, now I do! So that's some good stuff added to my toolkit.
I think hands were just intimidating for me for a long time, so this is great! I finally have enough confidence to attack these in my own projects.
Bonus: short recording of me messing with the hands, checking the collections, and testing out their deformations.
08/14/2026 - Finger! (Just one)
