Rigging the Boss

Another one of my tasks for the game was to rig the boss model. I was up for the task but if i'm honest i didn't know that much about rigging characters or other mesh's. I just referred back to a rigging module i did last semester and the resources i collected when i was doing that. Using that as my base i soon enough had all the bones and controllers set up for the mesh but realized a few things didn't need to be there. For example i could of just had one bone throughout the whole spine part instead of putting in several joints to make it bend with a cluster de-former. After all it was meant to be made out of solid lava and wouldn't be able to curve anyway.

I also had a problem with the curve of the spine with it's spline IK as it would shoot out of place when ever i would move the bosses master controller.
I decided to start over with the rigging as it wasn't going so well and was full of error's. I research a bit more in to it all and planned everything out to the best of my ability and knowledge.

I re-rigged the whole base but with just a couple of bones running through the spine and this time i didn't apply a spline IK or cluster de-former. Instead i just orient constrained the torso controller the joint where i wanted it to bend.

This was all going quite well and once i completed the rigging side of it i moved on to skinning the mesh. At this point when i was painting the weights to the mesh i kept encountering a problem with Maya where it would produce an error message and force it to shut down.

Error Message

I had no idea what to do to prevent this from happening as it kept occurring. I did some research and asked a few other students i changed to maya file type from MB to MA as i was told that benefits animation/rigging files. This seemed to fic my problem so i pushed on with the skinning.

Once this skinning was mostly there, i kept testing the rig with certain animations. I then realized that every time i moved the spine controller the base would move as well. I didn't want to base to move at all but it had to have influence applied to it. The only way i could think about fixing this was to put another joint in that would run from through the base and would connect to the spine joints. 

This meant i had to save the skinning weights and export them. I then detached the skin and added in the extra bone. Once i had re-applied the skinning weights i saw that it had messed everything up with the extra bone. This time there was no way around it, so i had to delete the skinning and start that again.

By this time i knew what i was doing with the skinning on this mesh so it didn't take me as long the second time round and it was a success. 

After completing the rigging and skinning and encountered another problem. Every time i moved the hierarchy the joints would move twice as fast as the mesh. This was another set back which was taking up time. I couldn't find a suitable solution online. I felt quite bad about this as i thought i was holding the team back as someone else was waiting for the rig in order to animate it. 

Rigging problem

I was determined to get this all sorted and asked a few fellow students to see if they knew why this problem was occurring. I then discovered that it was because the mesh and the joints were both in the master controller and didn't need to be. The mesh is already parented to the joints so it doesn't need to be part of the hierarchy. After moving the mesh out of the master controller in the outliner i was able to move, scale and rotate the finished rigged and skinning model with no problem. I quickly saved the file and uploaded it to dropbox ready for my team member to animate.

At this stage i couldn't be happier as i felt i'd finally completed a massive task. It was a great struggle at times and i thought i wasn't going to be able to do it. But after it i feel I've learnt a great deal about rigging and skinning mesh's and i don't think i'll forget it after the trouble i encountered. 

Completed Boss Rig