04 // Rigging the Soldier.... again

So Jimmy Comet let me down; the tutorial series of his which I was following along with had a few gaps in the process which quickly resulted in me completely losing track of what was going on. To counteract this unforeseen predicament, I located a similar tutorial by a man named Jamie Telford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA8X_KrmEhI&list=PL7LBwoM_OQiepN3-3mipmaI8NYiyNSGb_&index=54

This series proved to be quite a bit more direct and to the point. You can see the progress screenshots from my endeavor at the bottom of this post.

While his process was certainly a lot swifter and easier to follow along with, a major problem became apparent: he had no intention of rigging the hands of the character!! At first, I thought he was maybe saving them until the very end of the process. By the final video though, it had become very apparent that he'd never had any intention of doing the hands at all.

By this point, I really wished I had just asked for the link to the Digital Tutors tutorials, as I'm sure that would have been a complete set of educational videos covering every stage required to completely rig a character. But I didn't ask, as I didn't want to bother anyone. Silly me!

Nonetheless, Jamie Telford did a grand job of explaining most of the process quickly and concisely enough for me to follow along at a swift pace, so I now have a semi-working rig to show.

Next to be done is for me to create a tool that can assist the animator in some way. This is another part of the module that I've been dreading, as it will no doubt be quite heavy on the Python scripting. I will struggle onwards though...