Need advice on character creation


Hello everyone, I’m currently modeling a playable character (mechanized/robot something like that). And I’m stuck right now. I would like to know how the body parts for humanoid mechanized creatures are made? I do not understand how to avoid that the objects do not intersect. (I know that I may have formulated the question poorly, and therefore I attach a photo with clarifications)

If you have experience in creating such characters, please share your knowledge.

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This goes into the instructions for how to create the characters/art.

You have to work out the various necessary blend weights for each area, as well as necessary clearance distances for vertices for different layers of each body part of the character.
Then you have to make sure all the art actually adheres to these rules.
If you’re doing a lot of this (swappable parts and so on) then investing in building tools that verify the correctness of the weights and positions is worthwhile.

For hard plates, you might even need to use a special bone that will move it up/out a bit when the arm is raised, just like you’d have to do for a large hard plate if you were to actually build the thing in real steel.

For soft clothing, you may need to apply even more tech. The Roblox blog has a good write-up of a way to do this: Layers of Genius Behind Layered Clothing - Roblox Blog

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I watched this video, but it does not help me understand how rigging will look on a highly detailed character and how it will affect the detail

I understand that you can make a bunch of retractable mechanisms (like in transformers movies) but my level of modeling is much lower than that of someone who made these super-detailed robots. And in games, I did not notice this level of animation. And I still don’t understand and at the same time it’s interesting how they do it on complex models, and not on a bunch of basic primitives. I think rigging living humanoid but NOT mechanized creatures is easier to do (probably). But I need information, (preferably video footage) for mechanized creatures (yes, I partially understand that there is practically no difference)

There really isn’t much difference in workflow, compared to the super-detailed robots.
You animate the parts. Where you see penetration, you animate the parts differently. Sometimes, you need to add extra twist or offset bones to make the pieces not intersect, and animate those.

If you need to support swappable parts, then you need to define envelopes for each of the parts, and what the keep-in/keep-out zones are for each of them, and then make all the animations based on those defined zones.
You could for example rig a simple character that just uses boxes or simple meshes for the keep-in zone for each defined part, and use that when animating, and then make parts of different detail level / style that still stay within the given zones, to build the final character.

There’s really no shortcut. Add enough bones, and make the animations such that they don’t interfere. And, because it’s robots, you typically want every vertex to only be weighted to a single bone.
With soft deforming characters, you weight the vertices to more bones, but then the problem is instead texture stretching, plus you often need to add separate twist bones to be able to animate different movements without too much distortion. (High-end character rigs will use deformers, too, for things like squashing biceps when folding elbows and such. But robots are rigid, and don’t need that, unless you have flexible tubing or somesuch.)

ok, i got it