Blog Post 9 - Rigging - Painting Weights and IK Handles

The next stage of rigging is painting the weight of the model to the joints to help give the model natural flexibility when moving the model around when animating. If weights are not  paste on the joints will not move when moved into different positions. In the picture above the left shoulder is highlighted indicating that the weight of that joint will stay stuck to the joint. The lighter white the paint is the less movement the skin will have when moving the joints around. The darker the colour gets the less influence that joint has on the model. Black means no influence at all. What I wanted to do to help give my model as much of a natural movement as possible was overlap the the weights between joints. It was especially important between the knees and the elbows that the paints were paint evenly across the joints to help make the movement more natural. What I also did with move my model into weird positions to help find any unnatural shapes in the models.

The next stage is the IK handles which allows the user to control the whole lim. With IK handles it will calculate the most natural position for the part of the model your controlling to bend into. In the picture I have 5 IK handles, 1 for each limb and 1 for the spine of the model up to the head. If you want any part of the body to bend the right way you need the axix of all the joints to be facing the same way. If they don’t for example, an arm may bend the wrong way when moving it around. This happened to me whilst making this rig. What I did to solve this problem was to unbind the joints from the skin whilst maintaining the history of the painted weights and then go into the skeleton tab and open up orient joints. Check the setting are suited to what you need and apply to the joints that are selected.