Now that I was happy with the model it was now time to rig the character, Since I was not going to be animating Uncle Sam I thought the best way to do this would be to go into Zbrush and pose him using the rigging system in there.
Once he was in Zbrush I created a ZSphere and placed it in his chest and scaled it to fit. I then went on to create many more ZSpheres that joint up to the original ZSphere, doing this created a simple skeleton of Uncle Sam. Once I was happy with it I went to bind mesh, This made it so now when I moved a joint the model would move with it. I spent some time posing him until I was happy with the end result. The next step was to go into the Adaptive Skin tool and to make the adaptive skin, however when I went to do this ZBrush would then crash. I ended up losing quite a lot of work because of this as well as the skeleton in Zbrush. I repeated this about two more times trying slightly different ways but each time ZBrush would crash. So after losing the majority of the day trying to pose in ZBrush I had to leave it and try and create a rig in Maya.
Now that my character was back in Maya I needed to start creating the rig. I started by using the same work flow as in ZBrush. By this I mean I created the first joint in the waist this time and worked my way down the legs placing them where needed. Since I wasn't going to animate this I knew it would be okay just to add the joints in and not place any controllers as these were not needed. This helped cut the process down a lot.
Once I was happy with the layout I went to skin and used smooth bind tool. This now bound the mesh to the joints and I was able to pose him.
I would then pose him in quite extreme positions to see if there were any parts of the mesh that were being effected by joints that shouldnt be. If there were I would use the Paint Skin Weights Tool, this would allow me to tell what the joints should move and what shouldn't. This was quite a slow process as I was doing this at home, and I had my computer crash three times while attempting it. But in the end I was able to do it.
I wasnt able to get the original position I wanted with him having one foot on the helmets as the mesh would look weird in this position and I struggled to fix it. So in the end I had to have the basic position I originally planned. I was able to get the two arms into a good position which I was happy with and was able to move the fingers to look natural and realistic.
This is what the skeleton looked like once it was completed.
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