To get the robot arm moving in the video I first had to rig it before I even though about animating. I knew rigging would help me in the long run and it could be something fun to learn (it wasn't fun at all) it was also suggested to me by my teacher and everyone in the group agreed I was the only one with enough knowledge and patience to get it done.
First things first, I needed a tutorial, my teacher had given me a site to go on but that looked too complicated for a first timer, and I was only going to the basic rig to get the fingers moving with ease.
I had found a tutorial that showed me the basic of joints in Maya and parenting them to a solid. I first tried it out with a cube and practiced moving the ball joints. Once I had gotten a understanding I used the joints to try and build a finger and get a feeling of where each joint would go and how I could move them. My third test was where I wanted to see how a sphere and cube would move together with the joints in place, this was back when I was going to do ball joints for the fingers as well
Next, I then attempted to rig a whole plain arm. I got this from Mudbox and just cut off the extra faces until I was left with the arm. My original idea was to get the elbow to move and the wrist individually but I could never get them to move without moving the whole arm with them. Even after the paint weights they would still move together. So I then scrapped that idea and just focused on the hand and would have to worry about the elbow later. Moving on, I did an animation tester which you can view here:
When doing the paint weight I had originally thought it was easy on the tester model, later on when I attempted to rig the fully modelled arm did I realize I was terribly mistaken. Due to the extrusions this made painting weights extremely difficult, especially on the inside of the arm between layers where I couldn't see.
By this point I had gotten the hang of rigging so I started rigging my finished model so I could start animating. Due to earlier issues of the elbow not moving I stuck to the hand rig and then had to move the elbow and forearm manually. The first picture shows the most recent tester arm before the final, the second picture shows what I had to deal with when painting skin weights and how the white is everywhere you look, even after fixing it, it always comes back.
The final rig does have some issues, around the thumb when you move it upwards the faces around become distorted and very unrobot like. Thankfully due to my dark textures in that section and a well placed cup your unable to see it during the animation. I did attempted to fix it with the skin weights but no matter what I did it either affected more areas or made it look worse so I had to leave it. I did find the rig very helpful during the animation process, it definitely sped things along and made the movement so much more fluid that I could have done if I didn't have it.
This process was a learning experience for me as the only time I have ever touched a rig it was premade, so building my own was a challenge that I am grateful for now. I was able to help another student due to my newly gained knowledge and can use this in the future. I do still wish I had figured out how to rig the entire arm but due to deadlines I didn't have enough time and wanted to get this done. For my first time rigging I think I did pretty well, I researched rigging alot so I could get it as close to perfect as possible.
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