Wow. It sure would be nice if I actually knew how to use this frickin’ program. I just had a revelation. I realized that oh, I could maneuver Hattie’s skeleton into the necessary positions for the animation the way it was on Friday! So all that skin weights painting is fine, and I can use that version if I want, as it’s a heck of a lot better than what I was working on last night. I was modeling her arms straight out in front of her so that it would be closer to her normal position, holding on to her walker. However, when Maya auto-assigns skin weights when you bind the skeleton, it automatically sets the skin to be affected by the closest joint. Therefore, when I bound Hattie’s remodeled skin to the remodeled skeleton last night, her breasts were attached to her elbows. I spent hours trying to repaint her upper torso so that everything wouldn’t distort horribly out of proportion, and only got it halfway to the place I wanted it to be by the time I decided to go to sleep.
With Friday’s skin weights, I have the dress most of the way to where I want it, her torso responds decently well to movement in her spine, and her arm movement doesn’t distort her boobs. I just have to do some painting on her shoulders and maybe add influence objects on her elbows and armpits so stuff doesn’t collapse.
Ugh, I want this project to be over. Like Bilbo, I feel like butter scraped over too much bread. And I should be working on the Copyright paper, due Monday. Ten pages, and I have two. Back to work.
