Gladiator Finish - 3D Game Production Week 20

 This week I developed my gladiator to a final stage. After this week only the textures could be improved, and so I decided to focus on completing other things first before improving an already developed part of my work. 

First I added a biped to my gladiator model and did some rigging. I was surprised by how intuitive this was to do, and making body movements came naturally to me. I started from the pelvis and worked outwards toward the limbs. 

I worked on each part separately, thinking of the motions my character would be doing in a game environment. I put the rig bones in the middle of the anatomical forms, against putting them where real muscles would be. The distinction made sense after a while, as this would allow me to have an easier time skinning later.

After rigging the main parts of the body, I used some of the extra bones in order to add shape to the dangly bits of my character, this being the wrappings on the arm, as well as the cloth pieces on the waist. I found three bones to be enough for these as I didn't need more.

I rigged the fingers as seen below. Before starting my skinning process, I checked everything and created a test animation to simulate some motions.

Next, I added the Skin modifier. I had already reset my xForm and have created copies just in case I accidentally collapse it. Which I didn't. The animations that I had created were really useful in this stage as they allowed me to quickly move my character into various poses and fix him up. 

I added more weight to the center of a bone, and lessened the weight as the bone ended. The automatic balancing in Max helped me out a lot in this stage as I didn't actually have to waste time going through every single vertex.

I imported my gladiator into UE4 and made sure there were no errors. I separated the helmet and the other equipement and imported them separately. I created materials for the model.

I used the last key of the animation that I created to make my character strike a pose. I went back into Max and fixed the skinning in this pose a little bit.