I began the process of rigging my cowboy character, and I decided to use the advanced skeleton 5 tool instead of rigging from scratch to make the process faster. To prepare the model I followed the steps, grouping my geometry and deleting history. I merged the basic beneath areas of the body into one mesh, and kept accessories like the hat, belt, gun, etc. separate. Building the skeleton I ran into a few issues such as the gun making Maya crash, so I decided to just parent constrain it later. Once I had the skeleton in around the right place I built the skeleton and assigned weights automatically. I did a quick test of the rig, and adjusted the position of some of the joints such as in the hands and the elbows. I also added extra edge loops to the model in areas where there would be large amounts of deformation taking place – in the knees, elbows and fingers.

After this I started testing the rig, by rotating different controllers to make sure that it was deforming properly. It wasn’t that great, so I started flooding areas with 1.0 weight values, so that only one handle would affect that area. This did make it temporarily worse, but adjusting border edge loops of what I had already weight painted made it so that I could have nicer transitions from each weight painted areas. Moving the rig in all the ways it potentially would move in my animation was useful to make sure that all of the rig would deform properly and not break too much during my animation.

Eventually I was happy with this, and I started copying weight values onto the extra mesh shells on top of the base mesh, so that they would move with the rest of the mesh (for example the hat moving with the head, the boot spurs moving with the feet, the belt moving with the waist, etc.). This also required some fixing by flooding certain values to make sure that the accessories would not bend oddly when moving handles.