Free George Rig 1.3 released

[JiriH]

Hello,

I have finally released George Rig.

George Rig is a cartoon character rig with all features that animator would expect, including but not limited to:
- switchable FK & IK limbs;
- FK & IK torso;
- squash & stretch;
- advanced foot setup;
- detail facial rig;
- switchers GUI;
- etc.

Download the rig + guide + bonuses (zip file) here

Download only the rig here

Download the guide here


EDIT July 30, 2009:
There is new version of the George rig 1.2.
Main enhancements:
- new stretchy IK system (much better for FK - IK switching)
- bending bones work correctly in stretched positions
- nicer IK torso bones shapes as requested by users
- many other "under-the-hood" tweaks ...

EDIT July 14, 2009:
Atom has pointed out some suggestions for improvement (read hereunder).
So I have updated rig to George rig 1.1
Just use updated links above

EDIT August 9, 2009
- solved flipping of the spine, the shoulders and the neck when the rig was rotated upside down (180 degrees) - yes, some animators would like to animate ceiling walkcycles :-)
- enhanced parenting/multiple spaces switching constraints of the eyes target, neck and head
- some minor tweaks

I'd love to hear your feedback.

JiriH

[TweakingKnobs]

Grreat job man!!!

Thanx!!!

[elclanrs]

Wow really good rig! How long you've been working on him?

[JiriH]

Well, I guess it took me nearly half a year to develop all tricks. I wanted to go for my own setups and not to copy for example squash and stretch ringing usually seen in Blender rigs.

After the research to model and rig George took more or less 3 months because there have to be solved many issues when to make it all work together. As Blender is only hobby for me I worked only during my free weekend time.

But I guess now I could re-make the rig in week or two.

[JiriH]

EDIT: I have noticed that teeth were not enabled for rendering in outliner so I have just updated version was uploaded.

[Kiopaa]

Hi JiriH,
I'm very happy to see George finished, I just downloaded it : it's a very good rig and a nice character.
Thank you for sharing.
Kiopaa

[JiriH]

Thank you Kiopaa, I am honoured :-) By the spring I decided to add also facial rig, so this took me some time.

By the way thank you once more for your help with switching tests during February.

[Kiopaa]

Originally Posted by JiriH Thank you Kiopaa, I am honoured :-) By the spring I decided to add also facial rig, so this took me some time.

Your facial rig is very good. I have a character to rig, I will see how you made it.
It's a lot of action constraint to deform the jaw ?

Originally Posted by JiriH By the way thank you once more for your help with switching tests during February.

You're welcomed.
For the moment, we are closed to 2.5, and I don't know if all the scripts will work with...

(sorry for my english, always bad)

[JiriH]

I hope that macros will enable to help with seamless IK FK blend.

Concerning the face rig, in fact it was quite painful task to be honest. I decided to go for only bones facial rig, so best way is to have proper underlying detail bones placed and weighted. The just test some facials and record action. Later just link action to higher level facial bones. The action constraining was quite fast and easy. The difficult part is mouth corners rigging that works for smile as well as frown etc.

But I have developed great trick lately. You can have strong blend shapes for your face as well as facial rig that follows the blend shapes (bones on surface) nicely without deforming the blends until you move the bones directly :-) But this is still my secret (and more over no script needed for this).

[Atom]

If I stack up 3 default cubes I can still see George's head. This makes him over 9 feet tall in a Lux based rendering environment. Lux considers 1 Blender unit to be 1 meter.

What is the best way to scale the entire rig? I think 5'-6' would be a good size for George. Did you have any specific size in mind when you created the rig?

[Atom]

I put together some hair for the George Rig.

The BLEND file is here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=161320

What is the best way to attach the hair to the rig? Should I parent to the mesh, the bone?

[JiriH]

Concerning the scale unfortunately I have learned too late that 1 Blender unit is considered as 1 m by other render engines. It would be really enormous work to scale the whole rig. You know scaling complex rigs is not that easy.

So I promise with the next rig I will keep this in mind.

...

To Atom: Nice hair, it suits him very much. I would go for 3 vertices parenting or just join hear mesh with the body and give hair 100 % weight of DEF_Head bone from DEF_Armature (you can access this armature from Outliner quite easy, it is hidden on layer 10).

[Atom]

@JiriH: I am noticing a bug in the George rig. How do you rotate the rig? If I select the armature and rotate it, the head does not move and the hands do not either. Is there a way to block out movements using this rig?

[JiriH]

Atom, this is not a bug, it is a feature

Ok, no joking. The default set up is ready for animation. So if you need to rotate root bone (I guess you mean this one when speaking about whole armature rotation) and all other parts to follow rotation of the body, you have to change some sliders in GUI.
- hands/arms need to have locked hinge with body, so for arms turn FK torso hinge switchers to Y (yes)
- neck should also follow the rotation of the body, so turn rotation constraint of the neck to Y with FK torso
- head should also follow the rotation of the body, so turn rotation constraint of the head to Y with FK torso (or Y for neck as the neck rotation has been just constraint)

When testing the rig I found my default setup suitable for most cases. Usually animators do not want arms to follow rotations of the torso and usually also neck and head rotations are better to be separated form the body.

So just move this sliders and you are ready to rotate root bone and the whole rig should be stiff as you need.

[Atom]

@JiriH: Those suggestions do get the arms to work, but lock the head. Now I can not animate the head. Also the legs twist and turn when I rotate the rig using the suggestions you have above.

Basically the default settings are fine if only I could rotate the entire thing. On a whim I pulled down a few other rigs to see if they had similar problems and most of them worked the way I wanted them to. The BBB bunny, for example, I can select the armature, rotate it any way I want and still pose it without locking off anything. This George rig does not like certain rotations.

I hope I don't sound like a complainer. I am merely offering some feedback for this 1.0 rig as a semi-noob that tries to make use of it.

[JiriH]

Ohh, Atom, thanks you once more.

I found out better solution and you were right. My set up made sense concerning body but was not ok for whole rig. It was really problem that armature was not solid with root bone rotation.

So I made really quick correction, it took only few seconds to fix the problem. Feel free to download here above corrected rig - George rig 1.1
And big thank for testing and pointing this issue out, the x.1 belongs to you :-)

[Atom]

@JiriH: I pulled down George 1.1. Initial test look good, but have you noticed what is going on with his legs? Rotate him 180 degrees and examine the legs.

[JiriH]

Thank you very much, for bug tracing. This one was also easy one. I have uploaded corrected file (I used still 1.1 numbering).

[superx10]

Originally Posted by Atom If I stack up 3 default cubes I can still see George's head. This makes him over 9 feet tall in a Lux based rendering environment. Lux considers 1 Blender unit to be 1 meter. What is the best way to scale the entire rig? I think 5'-6' would be a good size for George. Did you have any specific size in mind when you created the rig?

IIRC the default cube is 2 Blender units. So he's more like 19.7 feet

[JiriH]

Atom, could you please confirm that now the rig works as expected? Thank you very much.