(Update) My Final Test Rig

[JA-forreal]

This my test "base" Armature that will be a rig guide for all of my current character animation projects. I built it based on some of the Blender rig examples and tips that I got here on Elysiun. Here it is. I'd love to hear any suggestions that you have. When I get more time to play with my rig setup I will try to enhance it more. I don't have all of this rigging stuff locked into my brain yet. I'm gettin there! Hehehe. Yeah.

I hope it can help add to our Blender Character animation knowledge base. When I have the time to to link it to a cool character mesh I will set it up with some NLA stuff and a little essay of what went into the setup.

Blend on!

http://www.solarflarestudios.com/for...oad.php?id=303

Add your own mesh. Make sure that all of your meshes extremities match up with my rig part for part. Study my rigs bone setup and my placement of ik constraints closely. Take your mesh and Crtl+P, Parent to my Armature. Choose "create from closest bones" or if you used my rigs bone names for groups use “don’t create groups” and adjust the weights to your taste and add salt y pepper.

[harkyman]

Just downloaded your rig and played with it a little. I have one that I've been using on a chacter anim piece that offers a little more in the way of dynamics and "full body" motion. Of course, I've been using it for a while, so I'm accustomed to it. Anyway, here's a link to the blend file (115k) and here's an image showing what to pull and push:

Blend File Here



The fingers are all set up with IK. I usually apply rotations directly to the scapula bones, even though their part of the arm's IK chain. It gives much better shoulder deformations. With this rig, I've been able to get characters to sit in a chair, cross their legs, cross their arms, scratch their chins, hold a cigarette, etc., with very little tweaking.

Things to look for in your own rig: Use the Hide feature for bones that don't need to be seen. Also, you may want to include target bones for your elbows and kness - they keep things in line.

Let me know what you think of my rig.

[JA-forreal]

Hey Harkyman! Thanks for the example rig. I will take in this knowledge and add it in "Borg like" fashion to my own. Whoa, I like the way you linked Copy Location constraints to the spine on the upper legs. That is a sweet setup. I had thought of something similar. I had the spine linked to location constraints at the heels then the pelvis. But your setup really fixes the spine giving it a smooth movement. I have never seen this setup and I have examined rigs for Maya and XSI. This is a revelation man. Cool! I have to study this rig. It's full of great Blender rigging info.

I feel the love man!

Blend on!

[JA-forreal]

Originally Posted by harkyman Just downloaded your rig and played with it a little.

I am new to character animation rigging. The only rigging that I have done in the past was only for character posing for renders. I'm looking forward to hearing what you think about my first test character animation ik constraint rig in Blender.

[OTO]

Hello JA-forreal

you rigging setup is nice, with some good solutions for some movements

I guess that you know my Stella Tutorial???

The problem with Blender is that bones are "heavy"
The more you have the more Blender slows

My advice to animation projects is that you must think the scenes in advance
and make different rigs for diferent needs

If your character in a particular scene only shows the arm, you can
do a complex rigging system only for the arm

Bye

[Chimera]

I did a littleee more complicated. here you see a screenshot

[luckybreak]

Wow thanks all of you for offering up rigs, I'll be checking them out when eventually get a PC (may be months )
LB

[theeth]

That's the rig I did for Nayman's Anaix from his Hunters short.
http://www.clubinfo.bdeb.qc.ca/~thee...p/AnaixRig.jpg

The blend will most likely end up online someday.

Martin

[JA-forreal]

Thanks everyone for responding to my post. I had been working on some of my rig setups alone and I kept coming up with roadblocks. Then I decided to share my progress with the Blender community and my problems faded almost as soon as I discussed them in some cases.

Yeah OTO, I tapped into your tutorial. It rocks. And Theeth, your deep man, real deep. I have been studying your Spider rig and I am just getting into its structure. Thanks for you tips and rig examples.

Blend on!

[JA-forreal]

Well, my first Blender character test rig setup task is "Locked Down"! Hehehe. I did it with all of you guys help. Thanks again!

Next Step: "Setting up Blender RVK Facial Targets"- In progress-
(While messing with the NLA system.)

Blend on!

[harkyman]

My next Blender dream is to have the rvk slider keys pulled into the NLA as an action strip. Now THAT would kick ass. You could also trigger an rvk action through bone constraints (i.e., targeted muscle deformation when joints move).

Glad we could help. Good luck!

[JA-forreal]

Originally Posted by harkyman My next Blender dream is to have the rvk slider keys pulled into the NLA as an action strip. Now THAT would kick ass. You could also trigger an rvk action through bone constraints (i.e., targeted muscle deformation when joints move). Glad we could help. Good luck!

That would twirl my world! I would also like to see some type of live selection feature that lets us slide our mouse over bones selecting them as we work. When the bones are selected they would become highlighted. Then we could instantly add ik setups, nulls, all in the same sequence with this live selection.

Blend on!

[zaz]

[color=red]JA-forreal:[/color]
A couple of good ideas in your rig. It'll be interesting to see how well you like having those IKs parented to the neck IK. I've gone back and forth on a similar setup and ended up unparenting them.

I'm doing virtually all of my facial animation via RVKs now, but still have my eyes, which are separate objects from my main mesh, parented to some eye and pupil bones. If your model has eyes, you may want to consider adding those to your rig as well.

Playing with your rig under a current CVS builds crashes blender with the assertion failure I've included below in case one of the developers sees this message. It happened when I was rotating your base or trying to move your neck IK. Versions 2.28c and 2.31 didn't crash. Not sure who's problem this is as mine didn't crash it, but just an FYI for you.

../../intern/moto/include/MT_Vector3.inl:19: MT_Vector3& MT_Vector3:perator/=(double): Assertion `!MT_fuzzyZero(s)' failed.



[color=red]harkyman:[/color]
I really like your pointing targets. Much better than the solution I've been using. I'm going to adapt my rig to use those.

I had a shoulder rig like yours initially, but found it really deformed the shoulders of my mesh too much and offered too much range of motion on the shoulder itself. I solved this by shortening the shoulder/scapula bone to only about 1/4th the distance between the spine and bicep bone. Its not anatomically correct at all, but until we can put weights on the IK solution, I think it provided better animation for my use.

[harkyman]

zaz - shortening the scapula bone is an excellent idea. I'll crib that one, I think.

[JA-forreal]

Originally Posted by zaz [color=red]JA-forreal:[/color] A couple of good ideas in your rig. It'll be interesting to see how well you like having those IKs parented to the neck IK. I've gone back and forth on a similar setup and ended up unparenting them. I'm doing virtually all of my facial animation via RVKs now, but still have my eyes, which are separate objects from my main mesh, parented to some eye and pupil bones. If your model has eyes, you may want to consider adding those to your rig as well. [color=red]harkyman:[/color] I really like your pointing targets. Much better than the solution I've been using. I'm going to adapt my rig to use those.

Thanks for testing my rig.

-I may drop the neck iks and only use the shoulder null ik.

-In my other rigs I have parented the eyes to the head.

-I have been going over the great Blender RVK tutorials and using one for Lightwave as a mesh selection target guide.

I liked Harkyman's joint setup too. I have to try it out on some of my characters.

[zaz]

I really like my neck IK. My comment about parenting stuff to the neck IK had to do with I think your wrist/hand IKs being parented to the neck (maybe shoulder, too lazy to look atm). I didn't mean to imply removal of the neck IK itself, only that you may want to unparent those other IKs from the neck IK.

I like the eyes parented to bones because of the ease of positioning the eyes and I use a constraint to force the left eye to track the same as the right eye, so only have to position one eye. I also added another bone coincident with the eye bone that I can scale to dialate the pupil. Yeah, most of all of this can be duplicated without the bones too, but that's the way I'm doing it now and haven't run into many deficiencies with it. Note, this is subject to change as I animate more, .

[shadowman99]

Some of you may have heard of Steven Stahlberg or been to his site http://optidigit.com/stevens/ - he's a top notch character modeler and animator, and um, he's been known to build a pretty girl or two. He has an interesting rig that I was reading about earlier.

http://optidigit.com/stevens/rigtut.html

I have zero Maya experience, so tell me if I'm understanding what he has done: it looks to me like he's joining his armature to a wrapper, and then the wrapper to his mesh. By adding extra distortion to the wrapper he corrects for distortions as knees bend, etc...

Is this a practical or desireable method for working in Blender? I'll be rigging my first Blender mesh soon, and this was interesting to me.

[zaz]

It looks like a combination of either armatures and lattices or armatures and RVKs, to put the maya features in blender terms. Maybe sort of a mix between them.

Just for kicks, I tried parenting a lattice to an armature, but as I thought, it didn't work. Since you can't have multiple parents, you can't use both the lattice and armature on your mesh at the same time either. Nor can we directly, i.e. without python (maybe with python), control an RVK's influence based on bone rotations. I've thought about looking to see if the last is possible at all via the python API, but haven't taken the time to do so yet.

It is definitely desireable to have the control those maya features provide, but I don't think we have them at this moment in blender. Weights, good meshs, good armatures and a bunch of tinkering are the tools we've got right now.

BTW, I don't think extorting meshs is legal, at least not in the USA, .

[JA-forreal]

Originally Posted by zaz It looks like a combination of either armatures and lattices or armatures and RVKs, to put the maya features in blender terms. Maybe sort of a mix between them. Just for kicks, I tried parenting a lattice to an armature, but as I thought, it didn't work. Since you can't have multiple parents, you can't use both the lattice and armature on your mesh at the same time either. Nor can we directly, i.e. without python (maybe with python), control an RVK's influence based on bone rotations. I've thought about looking to see if the last is possible at all via the python API, but haven't taken the time to do so yet. It is definitely desireable to have the control those maya features provide, but I don't think we have them at this moment in blender. Weights, good meshs, good armatures and a bunch of tinkering are the tools we've got right now.

I just updated my new guide rig. I made it a little leaner. Take it for a spin with a humanoid character. You can alter it to your liking. And if you do something really cool rig wise, by all means send it back up for us to test out.

Maya and XSI offer more layers of rig control. But for most character rigging needs Blender is just fine. And you have access to Blenders NLA system which is one of the best of this type of 3d animation systems, period.

Blend on!

[macouno]

Here's my current bone setup... rather different but see what the copy rotation I put on the Shin bone does when you rotate the foot IKA? It rotates the knee outward rather naturally.

The only bones I use to move anything are the IKA bones. (usually) I think you can use the trick I used on the shin bone somehow. Oh and I'd definitely use an IKA on your head. I do so wish for better rotational constraints though... but I am repeating myself.

http://www.alienhelpdesk.com/misc/lousbones.blend