Weight Painting
I have made a gif of each bone and it’s weight on Maya. I made manual tweaks to the weight paints, but overall the automatic weight painting did a good job. This is probably because most things were properly spaced out from the start. The only issue i encountered on both were the teeth, meaning i had to manually do them.
Each bone is named to show me what bone it is and i have an idea of where it is. For example the head bone will be the bone connected to the head.
Control rig process
I started off by making a few shapes of the control rig that i would like to use. I then put them on each bone i would like to control. It is important to do different shapes for some things as it allows you to differentiate the different types of control groups. For example my Root bone is made using a diamond shape. Once i had all my control rig in place i froze the transforms. This is so i can set them all to zero and get my rest pose back at the end.
You can edit the control rig curves to however you like them and you can add colours to them as well.
IK handles
I used IK handles to allow my feet to keep there position when moving and to help make more fluid movement when walking as the previous bones follow the motion of the end bone that it is connected to.
I only have them on the feet as most of the other places i would typically use a form of IK can be used with FK due to nature of how the T-rex walks. The arms have no reason for IK and the head doesn’t need it as it needs more of a curved motion to look more natural.
Unique Bones?
I added extra bones where you could go without. I put some on the throat to allow me to have an eating animation if i so wish. extra bones are useful as you don’t need to use them but they allow for extra creativity.
Conclusion
The weight painting isn’t perfect but in the end it didn’t effect the animations to much, i wish i would have looked into using muscles in the model to give more realism but at the same time it doesn’t need to have that level of realism as in the end of the day you can be more stylised with these types of animals as we don’t know exactly how they would have moved in real life.
I wished i would have using my retopologised model from the start rather than the medium poly model as it would have given me more time to create the animations.