Maya DIY Model Custom Controls & SDK's

The next part of the tutorial involved making 'custom controls and Sdk's'. This part was a lot more complex for me to begin with, but once I started doing more parts of the skeleton, I became familiar with the tools and was able to do the other side of the body with ease. 

I started with the eyebrows which I had to restart a few time because I kept adding an attribute to the wrong part of the model. I needed to add a deformer to give the eyebrow the ability to bend, which we did for the shoulder previously in the tutorials, so I remembered how to make this. Then it was a case of keying parts of the eyebrow and giving it limitations. In other words allowing it to bend a certain amount positively and negatively so that it's movements are natural.

Each time I did this I went into the graph editor to check how straight my keys were, and a lot of the time they were curved. This was easy enough to manage, however it made me question if I was doing something wrong to begin with.

Next I did the fingers which I am extremely proud of! As you can see in the image above, I can now move each finger individually! This is purely down to spending time painting the weights, but it was worth it because now the hand looks great! 

However when it came to keying the eyes and adding a 'blink', every time I moved an eye, part of the head would move with it. I was slightly confused why at first, but I quickly went into the painting weights tool again and found out that my eyes were being influenced by the top and back of the model's head! I used the 'replace' tool to fix this and it allowed the eyes to move on their own.

I then added parent constrains to the eyelids and the whole head now moves together instead of leaving the eyes behind. I'm not sure how much more there is to do with the model, but so far I can't wait to get making the turnaround and posing him! I am surprised with how much I have achieved in such a short time, but I think it is because I am really enjoying this part of the course and learning all about the Maya software, so hopefully I can carry this positivity on when I go to rig my own character!