Week 2 - Self Study

Hi everyone,

This is a devlog about my self-study progress in KIT207 for week 2. This week, I had the chance to practice with Bones, Rigging, and Animation. Since I'm new to Blender, I followed instructions on YouTube to create my character. Here's the link to the video I watched: 

And this is my robot after following instructions: 

Even though I followed the instructions in the video, I also made some adjustments based on my own ideas. For example, I swapped the headphones for bunny ears and lengthened the legs to better meet the project requirements (which specified upper legs, lower legs, and feet). After modeling my character, I used tutorials on Rigging with Mylo to attach bones to my unique robot. 

The real challenge came when I tried to rig my robot. Since it's built from removable components, and I used modifiers like array (for arms), mirror, and subdivision surface, parenting it with "Automatic Weights" didn't work. The robot wouldn't respond to bone movements in Pose Mode, even though I'd applied all transforms and joined the components beforehand. After scouring YouTube, searching Google, and even consulting ChatGPT, I discovered the culprit: uneven weight paint. I spent a significant amount of time learning and meticulously fixing the weight paint for each robot part. This experience definitely made me fluent in weight painting!

Finally, it was time for animation! This section introduced me to the timeline, keyframes, and various tools used to bring characters to life. I'm proud to say I created animations for my robot in three poses: idle, walking, and waving. The process was challenging, but seeing my robot come alive was incredibly rewarding.

Here's the animation of my fancy robot waving:

Here's the idle animation of my fancy robot:

The last animation to tackle was walking.

That's all for this devlog! This project definitely pushed my skills, but it was incredibly rewarding to learn so much about Blender and tackle new challenges like weight painting. Thanks for reading!