Week 27

Jumping Straight to it, I had to go to preferences in the edit tab and click on the add-ons tab, then I search for the word Rig, out of all the rig add-ons I am looking for the one called 'Rigging: Rigify', once the box is ticked I can close the add-on menu. From there I press Shift + A to bring up the creation menu, I go down to the Armature menu and select the 'human (meta-rig)' option, this will make the bones needed for my character. I delete the face bones and move all of the other bones where they should be on the mesh.

Once every bone is lined up, I can select the body then the Rig and parent them together, by right clicking, go down to the parent menu and then select the auto Weight paint option. This will do most of the work for us, but it isn't perfect, so how we edit the weight paints, is by selecting the rig then selecting the mesh that you want to edit the weight paint of, then just like the edit mode there should be one called Weight paint.

To edit the weight I first have to select a bone, lots of tutorials and post say that you can hold Ctrl + Click to select a bone, but for some that didn't work for me, but I found an alterative method where you select the move tool and then click on a bone which also works. 

Anyway to edit the weight paint you have a brush which you can use to paint weight onto your model, at the top you have three sliders which determine what kind of weight you paint onto your model, for example if the Weight slider is 1 then it will paint a red colour onto the model, this means that the area you just painted will be highly effected when that bone moves; if the weight slider is 0 then it will paint a dark blue colour onto the model, this means that the area painted wont be effected by the bone. As for the other sliders they are Strength (How strong the brush will paint onto the model) and Radius (How big the brush is). 

The Next Brush is probably my favourite as it makes the weight paint smooth, it is called the blur brush it is very useful as it makes the faces move smoothly, so that there aren't any jagged edges when the character moves any bones.

The other brushes I didn't use much, but the next brush is the Average brush, which gets the average of all the colour where you paint and then paints the average colour for that location. The next brush is the Smudge Brush, which is simple to understand, it smudges the weight paint colours together. Last brush it the gradient tool which goes from either 0 to 1 weight paint colours or 1 to 0 weight paint colours.

That's all the brushes for weight painting. Now back to the project, I selected the head bone and then selected the Hair to weight paint. Normally you would only select the hair that doesn't move to do this but I am running out of time so I will not be add separate bones for moving parts of the hair. So in the Hair weight paint mode, I paint all of the Hair Red so that it all moves with the head. I also do it to the actual head as well so that the whole head moves with the head bone.

At this point the cloths aren't attached to the rig, so we select all of cloth pieces and then select the rig, we go to the parent menu again, but this time we select parent without automatic weight paint, and select no weight paint instead, then one each cloth pieces we have to add a data transfer modifier. Once each of the cloth pieces have a data transfer modifier, we select the body as the source, last thing we have to do is tick Vertex Data box, then click the drop down menu  for Vertex Data, and select Vertex Groups, then apply the modifier. You have to do this for each piece of clothing, but it is worth it as it basically copies and pastes the bodies weight paint so that the cloths should move in the same way.