When finishing the textures, I moved onto rigging my model. Though I could have manually rigged my model, I knew that there were many industry-standard and widely used programs that handle auto rigging efficiently. I was advised that I could use Character Creator 4, which automatically rigs models using only pinpoints. Due to the efficiency and ease of this program, I chose it to proceed with the next step of my project. I took out my character’s capelet during the rigging process, as I wanted to alter it after I had finished posing, as I wanted the capelet to look more dynamic in the pose, which I would be able to sculpt and use cloth simulation for. Using a brief guide by Reallusion under the title ‘Auto Rig Tool for Creating Skeleton Characters: Advanced AccuRIG | Character Creator 4 Tutorial’, that I had found online regarding setting up the character rig, I managed to proceed with ease. I felt that this process saved me a lot of time and provided me with a very efficient and suitable rig for my character, but I saw that there were several errors that I could have prevented such as how the arms bent due to how I initially modelled him.
As I saw there were some slight defects with the rig, I imported the model and armature back into Blender and adjusted the weight painting. Looking back, I should have made the mesh and topology of the shirt more accustomed for rigging, as I saw many polygons stretched out, which in turn would make the textures look warped. I had to slightly manipulate the pose in order to make this less obvious, given that I had already made the textures beforehand. After adjusting the weight painting and getting the overall pose of my character in position, I looked at multiple other references deriving from the pose to position everything in a correct and realistic fashion. My main goal with the pose was to give the impression that he is stepping into or out of combat, and had the weapons in mind. As I knew I wanted to make a hybrid weapon, inspired by Bloodborne’s trick weapons, I made his hands go into respective positions, looking at references to see how each weapon was held to ensure accuracy. After this I imported the capelet to ZBrush, using the tools and cloth simulation to make the cape flow how I wanted it to. I was initially stuck on how the logistics of the cape within the character rig, as I knew it would cause clipping issues if I were to pose my character. After some feedback, I was told to already pose my character, so I could simply sculpt the direction and position of the cape, therefore meaning that I would not have to worry about any potential clipping issues in my project.
After this I imported the capelet to Zbrush, using the tools and cloth simulation to make the cape flow how I wanted it to. I didn’t want the pose to feel flat, so I gave the capelet a more dynamic position, keeping in mind how the larger cape was positioned. I noticed some errors in the mesh due to flipped normals, but could not find a way to fix them. Due to the erroneous section being one that was harder to see, I decided to leave it, but made sure that I would prevent errors like this moving forward. I found that I had to adjusts the cape’s texture slightly when re-importing it, which only required minor fixes. I baked the folds and high poly details into the cape, which brought out the folds more. Though, I realised I could have been slightly more bold with the folds and creases, as they ended up being quite subtle on the cape.