Simple full-body rig.

I’ve made a simple full-body rig that I hope will be useful to people. Anyone is free to use it for any purpose. And I honestly don’t care if I’m given credit or not.

So, here it is: http://www.cessen.com/storage/misc_files/full_body_rig.blend

http://www.cessen.com/storage/pictures/full_body_rig_screeny.png

A few notes:

  • There are parts of the rig hidden on the third layer. With the exception of the character root (the big house-shaped thing that moves the entire character) YOU SHOULD NOT ANIMATE WITH THESE. Everything you need to animate with is on the second layer. The third layer is more like the inner workings of the rig.

  • The entire rig is rotation-safe (I just made that term up), meaning that you can select the entire rig (including the hidden parts), or any individual part of the rig, and clear the rotations on it (alt-r) to bring it back to a default state.

  • The rig is not translation safe. I don’t think that can be done in Blender at the moment. However, I’ll work on making my next rig more translation safe, in the sense that you won’t be able to accidentally separate parts of the rig by dragging something you’re not supposed to.

  • I have rigged it with custom-made widgets, with different visual appearance. The different appearances mean the following:
    *The boxes are always for translating and are sometimes for rotation as well.
    *The sphere-ish things are only for rotation.
    *Empties are targets–in this case knee and elbow targets (these let you control where the knees and elbows are pointing).

  • Some of the actual meshes are supposed to be animated directly as well:
    *hips (rotation and translation)
    *rib-cage (rotation and translation)
    *hands (rotation)
    *toes (rotation)
    *shoulders (rotation)
    *head (rotation)
    *neck (rotation).
    Other than those, the rig should be animated only with the custom widgets.

  • The spine sucks. It really sucks. It really, really, really sucks. I’m sorry about that… I haven’t figured out a good way to rig spines in Blender yet. If anyone has any advice, I’d be happy for it. At the moment you control which direction the spine bends in with a rotation widget that I put in the lower back of the rib cage. You may run into some annoying separation issues while animating with it. Again, I apologize. I’ll try to figure out a better spine rig for the next one.

  • I am fully aware that I am using multiple armatures, and that this will prevent the rig from being used with organic characters. I assure you that I didn’t make the choice arbitrarily. The reason I used multiple armatures was purely to allow me to do proper knee and elbow targets (important), which cannot currently be done in Blender otherwise. See this thread for more information: https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=60756

  • The forearms and shins will stretch to accommodate the feet or wrists being pulled too far. I did this out of personal preference, and to allow cartoon-ish animation. I can imagine cases in which this behavior wouldn’t be ideal, however.

Enjoy!

wow this is really cool. :smiley: the empties work quite well.

I like how the legs and arms stretch. great for beginer animaters like myself.

how long did all the rigging take you?

its absolutely awesome! :smiley: great work.

Thanks! I’m glad it’s useful to you. :slight_smile:

It took me one all-nighter. It probably wouldn’t have taken me as long if I hadn’t been so tired. :wink:

I’m hoping to do better rigs in the future. In particular I’d like to figure out a way to make the spine behave well.

I think you’re running into the exact same issues I am with blender’s 90% useable rigging functions. It’s like ALMOST everything is there that would be required for a great rig. Some of the behaviors are weird, and certain things just make no sense (like the rotational targets for knee/elbows). I want a true 2D chain. Like you, I also gave up on the spine for now, and I’m using pure FK above the pelvis (besides the occasional IK for grabs and such). If I ever find anything clever that’ll fix either of our problems, I’ll let you know. :wink:

Thanks Cessan thats really cool! I’m not quite at the stage to start making my own rigs yet, but this will defintely come in handy when I do! If you make any more advanced/cooler rigs I do hope you’ll post them as well. :wink:

Its realy cool thanks.

Thank you very much, Cessen!!

This is really a good insight on how to rig in general and how to achieve specific things in Blender to boot. Thank you so much for sharing this work!

Hi Cessen,good work.
For spine you could try using the follow path constraint with offset for every bone and a fake ipocurve(you constraint the bone to lie in the same position).
The setup is a bit complex but you can simulate very well an isner spine(xsi )o an IksplineHandle(maya).I don’t remember well how to do the rolling stuff,it’s a thing that I have tried 2 years ago and I need thinking about it,maybe with blending rotations constraint.
But there is a problem,the Blender way to do this is cumbersone,because you need to do it all by hand,because the rest pose is different from the constraint pose(I find difficult to explain this better,but if you ever used maya or xsi know that the rigged pose IS the rest pose,different from the Blender way),you need to align by hand the edit mode bone position,orientation and roll value.
This not only for spine setup,but for facial rigging too,controlling with bone curves a face is possible,only really really tedious.
if I find an old file I’ll post it.
Bye

I’m using a second IK chain in the leg for the knee target.
And It works really fine for me…

I have also a solution for the spine but I’m to lazy to explain. Just download the file and tell me what you think :wink:
http://www.ronanzeegers.com/CG-forum/Rig-System-0.4.blend

Sorry, the rig is not finished and I didn’t had time to clean the scene…

http://www.ronanzeegers.com/CG-forum/running-man.png

Hey Ron7, thanks for the spine! That’s really clever. It’s still not ideal, but it is far, far better than what I had. Great work! I’ll definitely use that in my future rigs until I figure out something better.

As for the rest of your rig, it seems pretty good. But here are a few critiques if you want them:

  • You don’t have a way to rotate the foot from the ankle. This is fairly important for animating foot rotations in the air. (Good job giving ways to rotate from the ball and heel of the foot, though!)

  • You don’t have elbow targets (unless I missed them, in which case they should be more obvious). This is important for positioning the arms.

  • Some of your control objects are too small (wrist position, foot position, upper-body). Major control objects should always be big enough to select quickly and easily from almost any angle.

  • Although you do have knee targets, they do not work properly, and will fail under some circumstances. They have the same problems I ran into–the same problems that spawned this thread. I recommend you read it.

I hope that helps! You have a decent rig going already, but it can be even better. :slight_smile:

Hello Cessen,

Sure! I want critiques! Maybe we can build together the best blender biped rig/setup ever made :wink:

I’ve read all the thread about the leg rig but I’m not sure what is the problem about the second IK constraint. I have not used my rig with a full animation scene but I didn’t saw any problem with my current setup. Can you show me a case were the rig don’t works?

I dont understand why you absolutly want to be able to use multiple Armatures for one character setup. In the next blender release, there will be layers for bones and customisable looking bones. That’s almost all I want.

The only big problems I see right now are:

  • not being able to skin correctly segmented b-bones
  • a simple way to do IK/FK switch.
  • a simple way to do clear UI for the IPO Drivers. The possibility to color wireframe could be one of the solutions.

Now about your crits:

  • “You don’t have a way to rotate the foot from the ankle.” Yep, I know. I want to see if I can use a floor constraint here. Usually, I’m rigging my foots with the ankle rotation thing but I want to try an other solution.

  • “You don’t have elbow targets” - The rig is not finished. I have done only the IK constraint for the arm. That was enough to test my basic rig and do an running man. I’ll add the elbow target and an advanced fingers control very soon (with IPO Drivers and custom UI)

  • “Some of your control objects are too small” - The current b-bones are not the best way to show the control objects. I’ll change the wrist for sure but I’m waiting blender 2.42 to have really good looking controls. Especially for the foot position and the upper body…

  • “thanks for the spine! That’s really clever. It’s still not ideal, but it is far, far better than what I had.” - hum. Can you be more specific?