Quick note on problems I have overcome

One of he problems that popped up towards the end of the project came from the system i had set up that allowed me to be animaing with references even before the final character models ad textures were complete.

The idea was that i would animate with the most up to date models available and simply update the references each time. This all worked without any problems until it was time to add the textures to the the rigged and skinned models.

I gave Dan, Anna and Jake each a version of the character they were to texture un-rigged so that the history could easily be deleted after they had added all their UV unwrap nodes without destroying the skinning I had. I gave the team specific instructions to follow so that things would work properly when the models were handed back to me. I then took the unwrapped models back and transfer the the UVs over to my skinned versions of the characters. This worked perfectly with only a couple of button presses for Lee. However, once receiving Cho back i found that somewhere along this process the mesh had been combined and separated a number of times resulting in a mesh that Maya considered different from the skinned version despite the topology being identical. This mean that the attributes could not be copied across like before.

One solution that didn't work was to export the skin weights from the skinned version and apply them to the unwrapped version. This did not work because both models need the same uvs for the weights to be transferred properly which of course they did not have (the problem in the first place!).

After a couple of hours trying to find a solution through trial and error, I went online and found a plugin which exported skin weights relative to their global position. So I skinned the unwrapped model with the default settings making sure that it was set up in exactly the same way as the rigged version had been and then had to mess around with the script for another hour or so to get the desired results.

There was a similar problem with kitty but it was on a much smaller scale so I just re unwrapped the problem areas as Jake's original unwrapping was basic and easy to reproduce.

Just one of the many stress inducing problems I faced every day that stopped me from doing what I had scheduled to do!