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Rigging the Head

For my final post, I had to have it uploaded quickly, so I decided to go back to my head sculpt and do some rigging on it. Maybe I could fit in a bit of animation too.

To start, I first had to remesh my sculpt. The current head has around 1 million faces, which is way too many for anything other than rendering a still image. Trying to animate with that would make my computer burst into flames. To remesh, I used a program called Instant Meshes. This uses some algorithm to change the mess of a mesh my original head is to one that is 50 times smaller and is made up of a bunch of neat-looking quad faces. If I had done this by hand by making a brand new mesh over the original, it would be called retopologizing instead. 


Now that we have a lower poly mesh, we can add some bones to it. However, when I try and pose the bones the head is deforming weirdly.


This can all be fixed by changing the weight painting. The weight painting is a representation of how much influence each bone has on the model. I did a quick and messy job of weight painting this time, but if I didn't have 10 minutes left to write this I would have been more thorough and detailed.


Finally, with just a few minutes left on the clock, I end up with a badly rigged head that I can animate!



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