Simple biped rig - free to use

[Cessen]

I've put together a simple biped rig. The point was to create something for me to do animation tests with for potential employers (I'm currently looking for a job).



Download: biped_rig.blend

I've tried to keep it relatively simple, whilst still being useful.

Blue controls are for FK, red controls are for IK.
All animation controls are on the first armature layer except for the IK controls and sliders, which are on the 2nd and 8th layers, respectively.

All the controls are named appropriately, so if you aren't sure what something is for, just read its name.

The only tricky thing about this rig is that the arms, legs, and head are all hinged. This makes posing the character a bit annoying.
The reason I did that is because I discovered while animating for BBB that when the arms and head are *not* hinged it made the final stages of animation a pain in the ass. So it's a trade-off between mildly annoying initial posing and pain-in-the-ass finishing. I choose mildly annoying initial posing.

Feel free to do whatever you like with this rig: animate with it, modify it, re-release it, lie and claim you made it. Whatever. ;-)
I release it to public domain.

I welcome any feedback.

UPDATE:
I fixed some bugs in the rig. If you've already downloaded it, please re-download it if you intend to use it.

UPDATE 2:
I've put together a little animation to show off what the rig can do: biped_rig_example.mpg
It's in mpeg2 format, and is a little over 9MB

[rogper]

Thanks allot Cessen!
It is a very coll and clean rig, I'm reverse engenearing it as I write
Best of luck with the job hunting

[Aligorith]

Any reason why the legs are defaulted to fk too?

[FreakyDude]

screen looks nice, I'll check it out soon. Maybe try an animation with my stickfigure, cause they seem to have similar proportions, which would be cool...

One suggestion, try to call the rig, and file, something else than just "rig"
it's easier to lose track of it with such a basic name (for other people), because rig is just such a widespread and general term.

And good luck with the jobhunting... Do let us know when you have one.

[Cessen]

Aligorith:
The legs are FK by default for consistency. On all the sliders I make 0.0 = FK, and of course bones always start at 0.0 by default.

FreakyDude:
I have renamed the file to biped_rig.blend Still pretty generic, but it's an awfully generic rig to begin with.

[freen]

Nice rig!
I just finished a job where I really coulda used this. Mancandy is great, but is overkill for simpler characters.
Thanks for sharing Cessen, and good luck with the job hunting!

[kbot]

Thanks for the rig - just like rogper I will reverse engineer it too myself. Have admit some of the rigs out there are just too good to be true.

[doncuan]

Cessen - like the rig. Nice clean controls. Can I be a nuisance and trouble you with a few questions?
1. What do MCH and GZM stand for?
2. Did you have a particular source for learning how to rig / animate or was it just what you've found out from many places? Were there any main influences?
3. Does implementing a footroll control require a degree in maths? (I note python script)

Good luck with the job hunt. You going to put up any animations with this guy in the forums?

[JiriH]

Good luck with looking for a job.

[ardee]

Wow, just spent 20 minutes playing with the rig, great stuff, thank you very much for sharing. It's perfect for rigging game models due to it's "lightness".

Best of luck with the job hunting but with BBB on your CV I don't think you''ll have much trouble securing something interesting and hopefully lucrative.

--
http://www.digital-air.co.uk/

[Cessen]

Originally Posted by doncuan 1. What do MCH and GZM stand for?

MCH stands for "Mechanism". It indicates that the so-named bone is an underlying rig mechanism and shouldn't be directly manipulated by the animator.

GZM stands for "Gizmo". It indicates that the so-named mesh object is used for the appearance of one or more of the animation control bones.

2. Did you have a particular source for learning how to rig / animate or was it just what you've found out from many places? Were there any main influences?

My first real foray into rigging was back in my sophomore year in college, when I helped my animation instructor figure out some rigging stuff in XSI. He taught me a fair amount, and after that I helped him with some aspects that were confusing him.

Aside from that it's mostly just looking at feature documentation and other people's rigs (either the actual files, or rigging reels). For Big Buck Bunny I was largely inspired by Victor Vinyals rigging/animation reel which was getting a lot of attention at the time (and rightfully so).

Also, a lot of the learning I've done (though certainly not all of it) has come from trying to solve rigging problems on my own.
It's fine to follow tutorials and stuff, but until you start learning to solve rigging problems yourself, you'll always be stuck if you want to do something that hasn't been done before (or that there isn't a tutorial for). I think a lot of becoming a good rigger (which I'm still in the process of doing...) is just learning how to think and problem-solve on your own.

3. Does implementing a footroll control require a degree in maths? (I note python script)

Nope. You just have to copy my script. ;-)

Eh heh... anyway. But no, the footroll script doesn't use any math more complicated than high school trigonometry. And there may be alternative ways to accomplish it without a python script too. But for me this was the most direct and easily reusable way.

[kay_Eva]

Originally Posted by Cessen Feel free to do whatever you like with this rig: animate with it, modify it, re-release it, lie and claim you made it. Whatever. ;-)

This is the best rig I've ever made.

Well to be serious I didn't make it there was a guy named Cessen who worked on BBB, maybe you know him?

Anyways I've always wanted to make the elbow targets and also the hands how you have them but I never could figure it out before. Now I will study the hell out of this simply awesome rig!!

thank you!!!!

and great BBB animationzzz!!!

[xray51493]

This rig is great. Very simple to use. Im going to reverse engineer it as rogper and kbot did. And hopefully i can learn to rig from this.

[doncuan]

Cessen - thanks for the reply.

I was pretty good at maths in high school but that was about 14 years ago now... I will just have to rip off other people's scripts

[mikahl]

Nice clean rig, I don't mind the hinged at all, in fact its something I put in my own rigs quite a bit.

Best of luck with the job hunt.

[Cessen]

Originally Posted by mikahl Nice clean rig, I don't mind the hinged at all, in fact its something I put in my own rigs quite a bit.

Well, it's just that ideally the animator would be able to switch between hinged and not hinged. But I was feeling lazy and didn't want to figure out a way to do that just yet. ;-)

[kaotic_goodness]

Yesterday I spent an hour or so going through your BBB rigging tutorial. I swear I had every intention of setting up my own simple rig. Now? I'm still going to give it a shot, but thanks for the training wheels!

[doncuan]

Hi Cessen, sorry to be a pain in the arse

- as I understand it, you have the following to work the IK/FK switch
-> FK bones deforming arm mesh
-> these copy rotation of identical IK rig
-> influence of the copy is determined by the slider
-> the shoulder MCH holds the IK and FK chain start together so that you only need to copy the rotation and not the location

The legs are similar. I am just trying to work out why, when I grab the FK shin and move it around, the whole leg follows.


PS what do you mean by hinged?
Does blender support using on/off switches rather than having to set up sliders? (I am a bit of a n00b)

Cheers

[Cessen]

Originally Posted by doncuan as I understand it, you have the following to work the IK/FK switch -> FK bones deforming arm mesh -> these copy rotation of identical IK rig -> influence of the copy is determined by the slider -> the shoulder MCH holds the IK and FK chain start together so that you only need to copy the rotation and not the location

You've got it right except for that last item, which is actually unrelated and uneeded for the FK/IK switch. The FK/IK is just the first three you listed.

The legs are similar. I am just trying to work out why, when I grab the FK shin and move it around, the whole leg follows.

I do believe you've just found a blender bug! I tested it, and you're right: when the legs are IK, grabbing the FK shin still moves the leg (though you'll notice if you try to actually place it down, it snaps back to the IK position).

It seems to be related to Auto-IK which I have turned on (auto-IK is for posing FK chains as if they were IK).

PS what do you mean by hinged?

I mean that if you rotate the neck, for example, the head won't rotate with it.

Does blender support using on/off switches rather than having to set up sliders? (I am a bit of a n00b)

Not as such, no. But I think it would be pretty straightforward to rig up a slider that snaps to on/off and can't be in between.

[tcrazy]

Looks really good man.
Here's a quick render I did: