What I tried today#
Created blockmesh of mech in the blender. It’s one of the those days I just knew I would run into issues 100% and would not stop until I find a work around. And that’s exactly what happened.
The modeling was fine, with the previous experience modling the pod car, I didn’t run into much trouble modling from the sketch.
However, I ran into issue with auto rig pro where it tries to add twist bone to limbs, and to be honest, I could tell the fixing will take longer than just manually do the rigging myself. (Although the control rig was sick and most of the deformation worked properly – it’s meant for softbody and just not for hard surface afaik, maybe there’s advance settings for robots which I should def look into later).
After manually assigning vertex groups to each bone, deformation finally work as expected.
Here’s a quick pose I did for fun.
What worked#
I was lucky to find several informative youtube videos and they helped me quite a bit. I did just skim them but I’d be interested to follow through and make custom rigging. I tried really hard to follow the essential UE5 rig bones, such as root, pelvis, spine, clavicle and etc… I’m still yet to import into UE5 and retarget – that’ll be for tomorrow.
And what didn’t#
I was hoping I can do weight painting after auto rigging done its job, but somehow since it’s adding more bones, I was not getting ideal result. In retrospect, there might be settings I can toggle off the twist bone generations, and maybe can reduce future works.