Last week I ran into some problems with a project at work that required me to have just basic knowledge of rigging. After burning over an hour watching and rewatching tutorials, and, because I was under a tight deadline, I got frustrated and eventually just edited the mesh directly to get a basic pose.

Beginnings

Now that I’ve hit the deadline and delivered the project, I spent the following weekend to fix my problem once and for all.

Which is fine, for arriving at a character shape fairly quickly, but trash when it actually comes time to rig and animate several primitives as if they were one. So once I got my turtle shape, I joined 2 primitives at a time, and joined up the meshes as best I could. Pair by pair, until I had a turtle mesh and a shell mesh. In hindsight, I would have just joined up the shell and the turtle to get one mesh, but that’s what this whole project was for: learning. Once I had my meshes joined, I marked my seams, and UV unwrapped. Then it was time for texture painting!

Texture Painting

Rigging

Once my turtle was painted, it was time to rig. Now that the pressure was off, I had an opportunity to actually learn how to properly built a rig, set up IK constraints, and orient joints using pole targets. Woo!

Motion Tracking

Now that I had my rig all finished, I was ready to animate. And my IK constraints made it WAY easier to set a few keyframes and get a halfway decent animation. Next, motion tracking.

This one actually took me a few hours because I was having to relearn how Blender’s requirements for reconstruction. 1) Blender requires 8 continuous tracking points from the first frame to the last to even have enough data to reconstruct the scene. 2) the average solve error needs to be 0.3 pixels to get an accurate track. My first try resulted in a solve error of 35.6 pixels. So eventually, after learning the requirements, trying some addons, and manually helping it along, I eventually whittled the solve error down to 1.4. Close… Technically usable, but still not the best. In the end, I learned a TON from building this little guy from scratch. So without further ado, I present to you, Shelly.

Hopefully this helped someone. Thanks for reading!