Problems I Have Had With The Alien

Modelling:

During the modelling process of the alien I found it hard to start and create the model from the 2D drawing but I re-started many times and each time it did become a tiny bit easier making it. I had problems with the extrude tool which meant I had to really understand the basic features of this tool and the understand when and where to use the interactive split tool. 

Rigging:

This was not a problem as much, however when saving the file, and opening it on another occasion, Maya would have deleted or lost some of the work I did previously which resulted in me backing up many copies of the Alien Scenes. It also made me save multiple scene files in a project named differently each time so if the work I had done previously was lost I could go to a previous file and not have to restart all over again, which could have happened if the scene file was corrupted. I learnt about managing my work at this stage of the tutorials.

I had another problem which occurred when I had already gone past painting the skin weights and binding the skin. The right hand side of the skeleton joint where the forearm starts was not in line with the mesh of the alien which meant when it came to adding the attributes for a fist function, it would not act properly. The reason for this was because I had forgot to freeze transformations of all the controls so the values were not at 0. This was fixed without me needing to start again, but instead going back to a previous scene file before I had bind the mesh to the controls and skeleton. I had help from the a third year show me how to copy the rig to a duplicate alien mesh so I only had to re-paint the skin weights.

Skinning:

This caused the most problems, like the points mentioned above where previous work done went missing in a scene file so had to be re-done. The upside to this happening is I found the steps that I had to repeat multiple times easier to do and did it in a shorter amount of time because the new skills I was learning in the video tutorials were a lot to take in so having to re-do some of those steps did make certain processes easier to understand. 

The type of processes I mean for example was painting weights on the alien where we wanted it to have influence. I had to re-do painting weights on the jaw and did not follow the tutorial as much because I knew where I needed to paint the weights and where not to. At first, I did not understand what this feature did but now it is much clearer and I know that it can be different from model to model based on how you want it act.

Animation and Skin Weights

When I was animating the walk cycles I learnt that I had not properly painted the skin weights on my model and when I would move certain controls to a point my model would scrunch up like in the image below.

So I went back to check on the joints and re-painted the weights which has made the alien work a lot better. 

                                     

                                       

In this stage, when I had to re-do the custom attributes to the alien's feet, it cleared any confusion I had about set driven keys, because now I understand their function and how they can be programmed to fit different models depending on how your model moves and the acts.

The part where I add set driven keys to the hand to create an action of a opening and closing fist to the hand did not go well due the method I had used to model the alien, certain vertices were not joined so when it was the merged the tolerance value was too high so it brought certain vertices to a meeting point and made the fist action look distorted.

After having to repeat the process of adding set driven keys to the feet, eyes and arm controls, I remembered to write down the values used because it made the process a lot faster when it had to be done on both sides and I could just type in the values without having to adjust it to find the best value for the attributes. That is a work process that has been very useful so in the future when I am working generally with a range of values for different functions, I will remember to make note of them so if I need to go back or re-do it then I have the information I need.

Cleaning Up:

When following the part about adding some more constraints such as Smooth Divisions Attributes to make it easier to switch from a low poly model to a smoothed out version, I met some more problems as you can see in the image below.

I was adding the scale constraint so the scale of the alien could be controlled from the master control. When I followed all the steps and checked to see if it worked, when scaled down, it stretched as shown in the image. I do not know what went wrong here, because I re-traced the steps and re-did the process again but came to the same conclusion so my next step is to ask my tutor what went wrong.

This problem has now been solved, it was because of the influence weights were not painted so the geometry that you see stretching was not controlled by the head mesh.

After adjusting the influence weights, the master control now scales with the alien mesh perfectly. In the future, if this happens again, I have learnt to check using the painting weights tool to see if the problems lies there first.