Rigging and skinning

 

As this was my first time rigging and skinning a character I do think it could be vastly improved but also I think I did well. The deformation on the shoulders and skirt area are the weakest , the skirt could be fixed by attaching it to the body so it would  move in an identical way to the legs , the shoulder could be fixed by adding another loop to prevent the folding issues I have come across . I made a short kick animation sequence to test of the deformation and to also challenge myself to 3d animation. The most successful part of the skinning was how the arm guard followed the movement of the arm nicey without deofring a lot, it is wasnt attached to the arm I was worried at first it would be all over the place and hard to skin to fit the stretch and bend of the arm however this was not the case and I think the link structure of the piece was a huge advantage in this since it allowed it to bend and deform smoothly without clipping or drastic stretching

 

one problem I encountered was that I realised at the end the bounding box was skewed and I needed to reset the xform , however if you do this with a skinning modifier active it ruins the mesh completely  which you can see the the image to the right. To fix this I extracted the skinning mesh, collapsed the skinning modifier, reset the X-form and then re applied the skinning mesh I had extracted previously. This kept the majority of my skinning, I did find some areas had some issues but these were not hard to fix and was much better than having to start from scratch.