Week 2 - Rigging & Animating in Blender

Self Studies:

For this weeks self studies, I we were tasked with rigging and animating a character in Blender. I started out by creating a humanoid character in Blender, whereafter I added the skeleton to my character. By doing this, it allows you to move your 3D character around more easily, since a bone will move a selected section of your charcter, so you won't have to reshape it for every pose you want it to be in. However, I came across a lot of problems when it came to rigging my own personal character. 

As seen above, the automatic weight distrubution of the bones were not done properly by Blender, so I tried to solve it by manually weight painting my character. This was a very difficult task, and I honestly just ended up wasting far more time on it than I should have. 

As seen, the weight painting I did, did make a difference just not the one I had hoped for. Instead of wasting anymore time, I decided to find a 3D model I could download for free online and work on that instead. I found the model https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/character/man/fully-rigged-free-to-use-m... and removed the rigging that was already done to it, so that I could rig it myself and properly complete the task at hand.

After I lined up the bones to the character correctly, I got a much nicer result than previously. I was now ready to commence my animation of the imported and newly rigged model.

As seen in the three GIF's above, I created an idle, run (because it's faster than walking), and jump animation for the character to have. All that is left now is to import it into Unity and make him interact with the artificially created world for him.

Tutorial:

We imported the model with animations into Unity, and tried to make them work there.

And here he is in his idle animation, inside of Unity! Besides the animations, I made him run into a barrel and destroy it.

References:

Blender, Blender Fundamentals, viewed 2nd August 2023.
<https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1F2ddGya_8V90Kd5eC5PeBjySbXWGK1>