The Quarantine Curse is an Animator's Blessing

Spring Break was a great opportunity for me to work on my Final Product without worrying about an assessment due at the end of the week or any other grade that may take up my time. I was able to work on cleaning up my rig mathematically rather than jumping into it blindly with the Paint-Weight tool. I learned how to utilize Maya's Component editor to make sure there was no excess math that was building up on my rig. This meant I had to stop vertices from reacting to a bone movement that was nowhere near them, which will help the animation look a lot smoother and will shorten the time it takes to load my character into a game engine. When I began, obvious issues were present, such as how the rest of the head moved when I used the eye controller, or the elbow just looked unnatural when curling. While the paint tool put weights in through estimation, the Component Editor allowed me to input exact values into each vertice. The biggest spots I needed to adjust were around the head, but also with every joint bend which included the elbow, knee, and finger curls. This process is not difficult for me, but time consuming as I am working on almost each individual vertice. For now in this e-school period, I will have plenty of time to finish up cleaning, as my mentor has reviewed more areas that need work.