Study task 4 DUIK rigging

This study task took a while to do because i put a bit more effort then i should off but this was because i wanted to enjoy using DUIK even though i had some bad experience on my first go but have learned alot from the mistakes i made on to completing this task.

I first made a character that had gaps in between each body part, which made the process of rigging it using DUIK quite difficult because there were to many meshes and to make it even worse i made to many layers which made it not work in the end.

here's a screen shot:

placing the pins on to the body confused the program because each part was an individual layer, One of my friends gave me one important advice when he was helping me, which was that DUIK's purpose was to automatically make the joints to  the character move which means that there was no point in rigging this character because everything was separated and needed to be connected.

This is what happened when i did rig the character at its current state:

all the controllers and bits of the body would move out of place and rotate completely wrong, from the screen shot above. I had to go back and fix this problem because it was the character and not the rigging that was wrong.

i first went back to the characters design and combined specific layers together, for example the arm, forearm and hand on both sides. I ended up with 5 main layers which were head, torso, arms and legs. I also ended up filling in the gaps between each body part so they were on 1 mesh which is important and makes it easier for DUIK to link the bones.

here's the change i made:

I then went back to Rigging this character which i found much easier now that i only had 5 layers and got all the bones i needed and linked all the bones so they joined up and rigged it fairly quickly because i manually joined them, the reason as to why i manually IK'ed each part was because the full body rig took a bit of time and would not work with my rig properly.

I then had to decide what this character was doing and i was inspired by a YouTube video of a guy playing on a xylophone :

And i decided to make my character play the xylophone, so i quickly made his props and got him to hold two sticks. all i had to do was just key frame the character but i had some troubles on the way because the arms would bend really weirdly, i solve this by keeping the arm straight and changing the IK bone direction so that the bend would transition smoothly through each frame, here's a screen shoot of how the arm would bend:

Here is the end result once i finished placing all the key frames.

in the end i would not use DUIK much as it is not the animation style i like and seems like it would be better for funny animations as i found it funny from the result above.