Continued from Part 2.
Winter 2025 Review: Sluggo the Virtual Puppet
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| Virtual Sluggo giving you the side eye |
This is a continuing journal of my project to design and build "Sluggo," a physical hand puppet that I digitized, rigged, and developed with hand gesture controls in Unity.
Rigging Sluggo
The model was cleaned up and retopologized. Next, it needed a skeleton and skin binding so that the static mesh could be controlled dynamically through animation.
Step 1: Create the Skeleton
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| Sluggo in the X-ray machine |
Most rigging tools are designed to create a skeleton for a humanoid bipedal character. Sluggo has a very different body from a human, so I needed to create a custom rig.
Starting at the root, Sluggo's has a few spine joints to the base of his head, which also serves as the pivot point for his jaw. One joint controls the lower lip, which should flap open and closed when talking, controlled by my thumb. The upper lip is controlled by two different joints, controlled by my middle and ring fingers, which should allow me to manipulate them individually to "scrunch up" his upper face. This effect is used to express frustration in Muppets like Kermit and Elmo.
The two joints from the top of the head from the bases of the eyestalks will remain static. The eyestalks are controlled by my index and pinky fingers.
Step 2: Paint the Weights
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| The influence of Sluggo's lower lip |
Next, I painted the amount of influence each joint has on how the mesh deforms when it moves. Maya automatically set weight paints when the skin was bound to the skeleton, but these were not very good. I ended up flooding all influence weight to the root, then painstakingly hand-painted weights for each joint.
This section of the report only has two steps, but weight painting a deforming, cloth model took some time with tuning and refining to look good in different poses.
Next Step: Controlling in Unity
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| "Haven't I been through enough?" |
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