A few rigging questions

[Nacy Nightfire]

Overall, I'm pleased with my beginner attempts to build and skin my own avatar mesh.  I do have two questions. 

1) Is the head making jerking movements because of the default eye animations?  Can I incorporate the default eyes or if not, can I freeze the bones so they don't move at all?  Or do I need a freeze animation inworld.

I'm seeing some odd bending when sitting.  Can that be overcome?  Is it trial and error or do I need to work on the bone heat or move verts around? 

Any help would be appreciated.  Pics below:

 

[Rage Riptide]

Your problem immediately is the mesh. SImply won't work on an animated character. Sorry.  Check some tube vids on character modeling...  It's all there.

 

edit: That's a bit harsh, I know how much time it takes to learn. Maybe just some more loops or it could be fixed by wheighting. I dunno.

[Nacy Nightfire]

Not at all a bit harsh, although  I'm  actually pretty up to date on what's generally good topology flow for animation in theory if not so much in practice.  This is the most basic level of building the character in the state you see here.  Overall and to my surprise, the character animates at least as well as the default avatar with my ao, except for the bendy hip part.

So yes, I probably should have waited to ask that question until after I retopologized the model, which is part of my game plan, it just that takes so dang long and is so tedious, I wanted to have as much info as possible before hand.

The eye movement jerk is what's particularly got me stumped.

[Ripped Winkler]

Hi Nancy. firstly ensure the eye bones are clear of any wieghtpaint . or you can end up with them wieghted to your face causing distortion and general facial freekyness.

Secondly the hip bendyness is due to the position of the  upper leg ball joints being to close to the back of the mesh and mabey to high/ low. finding the sweet spot  dose take a bit of trial and error.

 

[guY Ralior]

Excellent first attempt for sure, a couple of things I can say that might help include first making sure you set your normal angle to achieve a smooth mesh and secondly all of the rest is weighting and bone position as another poster has said. You also wanna follow the rule of three on each bending joint which basically means you have three loops at each bending spot. The two outside loops help to hold the shape of the "body part" while the middle loop gives you something to bend and deform on. Smoothing your weights along these areas while the joint is bent will help you to achieve a better looking animation hope this helps you!

[Nacy Nightfire]

Thanks so much guyY, Ripped and Rage!  I've just picked this all up again after shelving rigging for a while and completely forgot to check the weight painting.  That said, I then cleared the weight paint for the eyes, moved the eyebones down and even locked them.  Still going wonky..but I'm so tired at this point I'll try fresh in the morning.  So many things to remember, and I'm so fixated on fixing non-manifold thingies, I've forgotten OTHER things that get me in trouble.

I repainted the weighting on the upper thigh and in Blender it fixed the sitting problem, ,but after uploading nothing changed.  Again, could be I need to get to retopologizing or just did something wrong.  I'll know tomorrow.

Again, thanks to you all for your generous help and advice.

Edited to add:  I'm going to try to relocate the hip sockets per your suggestion Ripped. I'm guessing its going to require a lot of fussy balancing between both bone position AND weighting and it's best left to the morning !