CLEANING UP HERO ASSETS

4 Major Hero Assets:

My Action Figure (HERO) – needs to be rigged and mesh might need tweaks on proportions to be more rig friendly, Retopo and UV unwrap, figure out how to rig the face.

Convertible Mclaren (HERO) – need to be retopo and textured and rigged, thinking of using the houdini rbd car rig

Lambo (hero) – Need to be retop textured and rigged, once one car gets rigged and figured out this and the porsche should be relatively quick.

Porsche (hero) – Need to be retop textured and rigged, once one car gets rigged and figured out this and the lambo should be relatively quick.

OG PROXY MESH
CLEAN UP IN NOMAD
BALL AND JOINT PREP

I think I will have to re-do my approach to rigging, currently because of proportions and the way the mesh was prepped in NOMAD I believe the mobility of the figure is not enough, lots of inner penetrations that are better to fix now then worry about later. 

The head asset I think I will use from Nomad but the rigging aspect I think I will repose the original mesh and then deconstruct and edit it fully in houdini to get the most appealing rig.

Original
joint reference
new pose
old | new
new pose

Using skeletons and bone deform I was able to get clean deformations on a “better pose”. 

Will boolean and isolate pieces to get a cleaner and nicer looking action figure.

key parts are to make sure shoulders have the most range of motion along with the pelvis. Neck and Wrists/Ankles are also important, the rest will be simple.

New Joint Layout using Booleans, mirror and clip and Quad Remesh
Exploded view
Step by Step process on Joint Prep

I decided to rethink the way that I would move as an action figure. After looking at lots of reference and even some exploded views I realized that mainly my neck, shoulder, wrist, pelvis, and ankle are the only parts that need “full mobility.” I made those joints ball and socket joints and use a sphere as boolean to cut and and split pieces, but also added prim geo to the original AI mesh and boolean and smoothly connected them to create something that feels like it would actually work.

all the split geo from the boolean I stored the centroid to use to quickly create a skeleton on packed geo.

quick skeleton with bone deform on packed geo
Finished Head with misc parts
Head Retopo (Maya) + Blendshapes
Hair Prep
Finished Asset
Apex Rig || Full IK/FK
Apex Node Setup

This is a textured and rendered version of my asset. This is rendered in Karma CPU but I will be shifting to redshift as it is significantly faster for my use case.