Sem 2 week 5

 With the skeleton rigs in place for each of my models, this week I spent most of my time parenting and overcoming errors. 

I first tried to parent Mikey's mesh to the rig, however, after extremely long loading times in blender, the program gave me the following error: Bone Heat Weighting: Failed to find solution for one or more bones

After following multiple online tutorials, I tried a few different solutions. I believe the issue originates from when two meshes are overlapping causing the rig to not work. To remedy this, I tried merging all of Mikey's separate pieces together and merging the vertices in edit mode. This effectively deleted thousands of faces from the model, leaving holes in the model that were very noticeable. Although this method allowed the rig to work, I didn't want to sacrifice any quality in the model. 

The next method I tried was using blender's decimation modifier. This halved the models faces in half allowing blender to process the parenting a lot easier. However, once again this meant a sacrifice in quality for the rig to function which was not acceptable. 

After following another tutorial, I trialed Blender's value copy modifier. This tool allowed me to copy the movements from the decimated model onto a new model. Practically, it will be as if the original model is parented to the rig, when in fact it is actually copying the movements of low quality rigged model. from here all I had to do was hide the low quality model.

This problem solving took up most of my time this week. I will continue to parent and pose the monsters next week.