I decided to see how far I could go, by modifying the default Makehuman rig, rather than rerig her, as (aside from it being a good rig) I wanted to see what sorts of design decisions real armourers had to make when allowing for a moving human body within their armour (since I didn't know).
As she is wearing solid armour, properly animating many of her limbs has called for a few judgement calls, as to how bad the collisions were (in other words, did I cut away the vertices of the armour, or delete the offending vertices from the character's own vertex groups?) On the whole, it's not a hard decision to make, since if it impinges on the movement of a part of the body that must move, to produce the limb movement, then cut away the armour and put the protection back on, somewhere on a plate that moves freely (it's what a real armourers did, of course!) If the body parts in question would stay put, if constrained within a metal case - like the belly region when encountering the lower inner sides of a breastpalte that held them, for instance - remove the offending vertices from the deformation group of the character's mesh.
If neither can be reconciled, then apply limits to the actual bone rotations: wearing armour is constraining, after all, and you want your character to animate as if held within the boundaries imposed by having plates of amunition steel strapped to her. Makehuman characters can do what no real human can do with their limbs, anyway, so heaven help what would happen if they were encased in metal!
She still needs a lot of normal mapping, for things like armour flutes and leather tooling, of course, but It's still been a very enjoyable afternoon. She may be a little obvious, but t great thing about her, is that being, essentially an armour-plated barbie doll, I can accessorise her endlessly, and the accessorising costs nothing more than a little sweat and learning. Next, I was thinking maybe an armoured horse, perhaps, or a retinue of archers... What do you think?
As a side note, her hair makes use of a trick I've taken to, with other Makehuman characters. Her main hair is a mesh hair, with alpha-transparency locks. While it is reasonably high-polly, it will render far quicker, during animation, than a particle system of the same complexity. When the crown and feathers, respectively, are weight-painted to the movements of her head and neck vertebrae, this will produce reasonably adequate motion-following - as my pose, above, hopefully demonstrates.
The problem always with mesh hair, though, is how to weld it to the scalp, convincingly, rather than it just looking like a helmet of hair - and for that, I use my other trick.
I've added a particle system along the front of the scalp (about twenty hairs , in total with just 40 children) - all the way down from the top of the forehead to just before the ears - whose length, in real life terms, adds up to around two to three inches on our heads. These particle hairs have no physics, or whathaveyou - they exist solely so that you can comb - using Blenders beloved particle comb - up into the mesh hair, to form a neat junction between the two. The only trick, is to experiment with the textures and materials on both, to make sure the boundary isn't to apparent between them.
The one above still needs a little work in that regards. but I find it adequate - and I'd frankly rather have quick-rendered animations, while I'm still learning, than have beautify flowing locks that, inexplicably, won't stay on their characters' heads!
Anyway, thanks Makehuman people: I just dropped by to say you make me look better than am.
