Technical Difficulties faced during the Fluffymallow Project

There are a few problems that we encounter throughout the Fluffymallow Project:

Taking the HDRI Lighting in the morning (7.00 a.m.)

The lighting changes dramatically when we were shooting. The 0 exposure of the 7.00 a.m. sky is 2 stops darker than the 0 exposure of the 7.15 a.m. sky.

Solution: We took our footage and HDRI lighting at 10 a.m., which has a more stable exposure level.

Paint Weighting the Spikes of Marsh 

The spikes on Marsh's Back are painful to paint weight. And only after 1 week of paint weighting, I realized the spikes are supposed to not deform. (They are supposed to be hard.)

However, the spikes in the model was prepared for a soft-mesh deformation, and there was no time to readjust the design or the model.

Failed Solution: Create a lot of controllable joints to paint weight the spikes separately.

Solution: Limit all spine animation in the shots showing his back to avoid spike extreme deformations or intersections. Most of the shots are low angle front view shots that can't focus on the back, so the spikes deformations are not urgently important.

Referencing Files for Textures

Textures can't load because of wrong path directory, C:\Users\Desktop\...etc.

Solution:
The texture files are supposed to link from sourceimages\
so that it will follow the project instead of the path in each individual computers.

Making the rig scale-able

There are many things to look out for when making the scale of the rig adjustable.

1. Connecting the controller scale attributes to the correct attributes: For the case of global scale, group all the joints together and connect the scale of the Main controller to the Joint group. A scaling group is needed because connecting the scale attribute to an individual joint will not affect the children joints, and connecting to all joints separately will cause the rig to be inflexible for individual joint modifications.
2. Only skinned Geometries are following the Joint Scale. Geometries with Parent Constraint will need their Scale attributes connected.
3. Geometries with IKSpline Joints will need an additional group for the control joints controlling the curve.

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