Hi there, Minnie here again,   

Throughout this project I feel that I've really perfected my 3D modelling process. It took a lot of experimentation, and I had to learn to swallow my pride and ask for help when I couldn't figure something out, but the bird models and their animations really are my personal favourite contribution to our project.  

Before this project, I’d never actually rigged and then animated with that rig before. Figuring out how to best prepare these models and their animations for Unity was such a long, rewarding, tedious process.  

Initially, I tried using a method within Maya called “Quick-Rig.” For those of you who aren't familiar, it essentially makes a rig for you within your specified rules. It works well enough for people and human-like models, but for my birds, I needed extra controls and more specific weight painting. I started by creating bones, making sure I have places to control each of the wings, the feet, the head, and the tail. After making sure it's all symmetrical and all organised correctly, I'd bind the skin and begin weight painting.  

When I tell you I hate weight painting, it would genuinely be an understatement. With the human models, it was a nightmare- the Quick-Rig kept misunderstanding my models, and because I had multiple separate meshes within the human model, I had to go back and forth a lot, testing and figuring out how to best prevent clipping within the animations. When I did eventually finish the rigs, I sent them off to our animator, Harsh, to finish with his own personal flair. The birds were a bit simpler because they were all just one, uncomplicated mesh. I didn't have any issues with clipping, and the automatic skin weights started pretty close to the end result. I didn't change much, I just had to reduce the wings and legs surrounding the selected area. 

After the birds' rigs were finally finished, I animated each of the birds, trying to embody as much of their individual charms into their animations as possible. The animations for the human models are not fully finished and implemented at this point, but there are plans to redo the rig entirely in the future, and when the rig is optimised, the animations should be a breeze to get through.