Posing and Rendering

 As my character is now modelled and textured, the last thing to do now is to pose it and to render it. 

I imported the mesh to Maya (Autodesk, 2020), I changed the mode to Rigging. Then, I took off all clothes from my character, because they are very loose and it is hard to spot the silhouette of my shaman in them. Later, in a front view, I put the first joint in the middle of the lower part of the body. Next, I gradually added joints on the chest, neck, head, arm, wrist, hip, knee, ankle, foot, toe and fingers. Then I changed the names to all joints, so it would be easier for me to identify them later. When I had the whole left side ready, I mirrored it, by changing the world "Left" to "Right". After that, I selected the mesh of the skeleton and I bound the skin. 

Skeleton of my character

Now I was able to move joints. To prevent any irreversible poses, I set the key on an "A" pose, so I can come back to it whenever I want to. I have noticed that when I am moving the joint, the geometry of the mesh crashes. That is when it is recommended to modify skin weights. If I will not do it, this is what will happen to my mesh, whenever I try to pose it: 

After many hours of changing the configuration of skin weights in the Upper Arm, I finally found the one working:

However, it still was not clean.

And no matter what kind of move I would try to make, the whole mesh crashed.

This is probably because of the number of layers that my character has and the thickness of them. I spend long hours and days training to make it work in every way possible, but it still was not.

So I started watching various tutorials on YouTube (2021) trying to learn a way around it, but most of the tutorials had characters with very thin/tight clothing, so it was not the same.

However, I finally found a tutorial "Quick Rigging and Skinning a character for beginners" (2016) by Maya Learning Channel with a different method than I used. I had nothing to lose, so I followed it.

This technique used the Quick Rig option in Maya (2020). I just had to select my mesh, and press "auto-rig" and it was able to build a skeleton by itself. Of course, it was not perfect, but the effect was much better than when I have done it manually. Also, Quick Rig allows us to rearrange the guides in the step-by-step method. When I was satisfied with the positioning of guides, I created a skeleton based on them, and then I skinned it. In this technique, I could still modify skin weights to bring them to perfection. After that, I created joints on the hands manually and I connected them to the skeleton with the help of Human IK. But after doing so, all my skin weights reset themselves. It turned out that before I made joints for the fingers, I should have exported the skin weights, and then import them. So I have done it again, but I could not export the skin weights because of some error that I could not find the solution for online. That is why I came back to my previous save and I posed the character there.

Posed Character

Now was the time to render the shaman in Unreal Engine 4 (Epic Games, 2020).

I started with making a new project, and then a new, empty level. Then I put the cube in the scene, and I made a floor out of it. I imported all texture maps and the mesh of my character, and I made materials out of those maps.

Setting up of a material

Later I placed the shaman in the scene in 0.0.0 location and I applied all those materials to him.

I added three directional lights: in the front, from the side, in the back. I added some colours to them, to make them more interesting. Then I put Post Process Volume, Skylight, Sphere Reflection Capture, and Exponential Height Fog. I modified fog settings and I changed its colour. 

After that, when I felt that the scene is ready to render, I added Level Sequence.

I placed the camera, set the rotation for a turntable and I rendered an image sequence of 200 frames in 1080p. I edited it in After Effects and it was done.

Here is the effect:

And a few key frames:

I am very happy with how this character turned out.

Bibliography:

Software:

Autodesk, 2020. Maya [software]. Windows 10. San Rafael, CA: Autodesk.  

Epic Games, 2020. Unreal Engine 4 [software]. Windows 10. North California: Epic Games, Inc.

YouTube Videos:

Maya Learning Channel (2016), Quick Rigging and Skinning a character for beginners. [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c538zkwxgTQ [Accessed 25/06/2021]