Skinning

It was time to skin Gordon, I could see straight away that how I made the arms in the rig were not going to work. I started with a hi-solver which had to be taken off as it was causing my arms to twist uncontrollably, I tried to rectify this problem however found myself getting into more indepth and complicating situations. I decided to scrap the arms, enter bone edit mode and make myself some new simple arms that just worked as independant bones. It did the trick for what i was looking for. However will change this when rigging my character propperly.

Another problem I was having was the neck, as i didnt place clavicle bones in, the shoulders, head, neck and back were being drawn totally to the wrong bones. There was only so much edit envelopes would do, therefore I had to bake the weights to the vertices and use a tool called paint weights. It basically allows you to go in and fine tune the weights to specific verts. It also gave me another reason to get my graphics tablet out aswell! Paint weights worked very well and seemed to do the trick when multiplied with another helpfull tool called blend weights. Below is a picture of the neck with horrible crimping.

Other problems I had with skinning were at the knees and elbows. They would collapse and look awfull. I used a gizmo which was made specifically for the use of knees and elbows. This helped a little but still didnt look right. Some more tweaking was needed!