To start the week, I finally rigged up the eyes. The way it works is that each eye is parented to a bone, and those bones are constrained to follow controller bones. Those controller bones are then parented to follow a sight line bone. This rig was done using PIXXO 3D's Eye Rigging tutorial.
And here it is in action!
Then, I finished up the weight painting on the rig, so now the chest strap doesnt clip into the chest when twisting, as well as a few other things.
Next, I finally modeled the sword that gives the swordswoman her title of swordswoman. It's fairly simple and uses all the same techniques for modeling and shading that I used for the character mesh, so I've only included the final object.
Here's what it looks like in the sheath now.
To get the sword to snap to the sheath and to the hand, I ended up using Pierrick Picaut's weapon and equipment rigging tutorial, which was super useful in learning about bone constraints and parenting.
Essentially, there is a sword controller bone that is parented to the sheath that follows the sheath's orientation, and then a bone parented to the hand where the area of snapping will be. You can see these bones in the image below.
Then, a copy transform constraint is put on the controller bone, following the hand snapping bone. When the influence is 0, nothing happens...
But set the influence to 1, and now the sword snaps to the hand!
The best part about this setup is that since the hand snapping point is parented to the hand, the sword will follow the arm movements flawlessly. Here's a video showing it off.
And there you have it. she's ready to rock! the only other thing I didn't show of this week's work was editing the hand and knee topology and proportions to better accommodate animation, but that was less pertinent to progress this week so it was omitted.
Next week: finalization, turnaround render, and animation testing. We're at the finish line now!
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