The first major change before continuing was changing the shader materials completely, as well as adding some extra hair strands to break up the hairline a bit and add some more visual flair to the face. For the shaders, I used Lightning Boy Studio's tutorial series for creating toon shading using 3 light sources. This should help immensely with final environment renders!
Next I moved on to fixing the metal on the arm guard and the shading on the eyes. For the arm, I averaged the normals based on face position, and applied a metal texture matcap to give it a metallic appearance. For the eyes, I actually applied the same matcap but upside down, to capture the reflective light on the underside of the eye. The eyes also had a specular applied to have a reflective highlight based on the light source
Next came rigging, which was a REALLY tedious and difficult process. First, I created a basic rig to tie everything to...
Then the really hard part: weight painting. I learned during this that having my mesh separated into distinct pieces made things pretty difficult for weighting and rigging, because if not properly weighted, parts of the mesh would clip and disconnect from each other.
The process for weighting was fairly straightforward though, I hid parts of the mesh while working with different bones, and slowly through trial and error making it all work together.
And finally, the last thing I did this week: blend shapes! They're super useful for facial posing, and how they essentially work is that I created different versions of the model where aspects of the face are moved around or deformed, and then blender allows for interpolation between those different variations along a gradient slider.
So I can move the jaw...
The lips and cheeks...
The eyebrows...
Or a combination of all! On top of those base poses, I also separated them into left and right independent variants, for asymmetrical posing.
With all of these base keyposes, I can tweak and adjust them in subtle ways to create some expressive faces, and also keyframe each base pose to animate the face on top of that.
And finally, with a basic rig and facial posing, she can finally come to life a bit! It's still unfinished though, as you can see some clipping in areas, but it's getting there!
That's all for now, next week is the finished rig, and maybe some animation testing!
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