It’s probably on a different layer - if you don’t know what I mean take a look at this screen:
You should also change the display options to wire. press F7 to go to the object button panel, and in the draw tab, select wire instead of solid.
This is explained in the manual at my site, page 4 of the little_fella documentation:
cheers.
Back ontopic, update for at least the MTI_stickman rig coming soon. need to do some tweaks to the devil after that and replace the old rig with the new one.
EDIT:
I forgot, Tim, I like the pose, I was wondering, how do you get the background to be so “blendy gradient”?
I use a ramp/halfpipe kinda setup, but it’s real pain to get nice shadows without something clipping off in the background or some ugly highlight or something. Particularly when using such a low camera angle.
What is the setup for the render if I may ask?
Nope, that’s the one I edited! 
This is what the original looks like:
I actually have gotten pretty frustrated with this too - that’s why I went with the easy solution: an alpha plane. All you have to do is add a plane for the shadows, go to shaders and hit onlyshadow, and then go to your world settings and change the colors. It’s fairly simple, but it took me a long time to realise that I could just do it that way. It also saves a lot of time, because you don’t have to make the mesh or worry about lighting issues. 
Regards,
Tim
Prerelease version of the MTI_stickman can be downloaded at my site. I’m waiting with the devildude untill I tested this one some more.
I originally tried to get pretty much everything in one control, stretch, IK/FK, and combinations of those, and control em with sliders. Didn’t work outt, so now there are 3 bone layers with controls.
first one is for plain old IK
second one is for stretchy
third one is for FK (no drivers yet, so manually set the IK influence to zero)
enjoy, and if you people find bugs, please let me know, I’ll fix it then.
EDIT: forgot the site: http://tieleman.m.googlepages.com
and its a prerelease of version 2, obviously… I am so tired…
Shot at 2008-06-02
Shot at 2008-06-02
@Tim,
that rocks! going to save me heaps of rendertime and artifacts… thanks.
Okay fellas, here’s the new version of the MTI_stickman rig.
I haven’t done the devildude yet. will be sometime around this weekend, or next week or summat.
No new screens sorry, too tired right now. Check the previous post to see what it looks like.
Either way, I think the current version is clean and all that.
It has the features I wanted to get working. (I couldn’t get everything (stretch, and IK and FK) in one control, so I split them up over the 1st, 2nd and 3rd bone layers.
Seems to work pretty well.
I made sure I uploaded a properly working file, like last time, Just downloaded it and tried the file here. This time the sliders all work as they should. If anyone has any trouble with it, please let me know.
Download at my site, see sig…
just in case: tieleman.m.googlepages.com
Sweet! I love this rig, but that refresh bug was driving me insane.
So now the question is… Is there anyway to use the animations I’ve made with V1 and port them over to V2? I’d rather avoid redoing it all. >.<
Well, the same controls from the first rig are still there, so if you append the actions from the old files, I think they should all work fine. The stretch is more of a layer on top (heh… ONTOP, the name of the company I work for) of the IK/FK system. I tried different approaches, but in the end the deform functions were moved from the regular bones to the stretch bones, which are parented/constrained to the old system. seems to work best.
One thing has changed though:
the elbow and knee poles are no longer parented to a bone that stretches for the feet/hands. So you may have to re-animate the pole bones…
If you really really, really need the animations to transfer unalteredly, you’d have to add these “stretch to IK target from the hip/shoulder, and parent the poles to them” bones again. 4 bones, 4 constraints and parent the 4 poles to em. But I’d just re-animate the poles.
And HEY! If you have animations, can I see them? through youtube or something?
EDIT:
I forgot, you probably have noticed, but there is a little hat on top of him now, basically, if you have some kind of hat, for eeeehm a party or summat (appelflap anyone?) you can parent it to that bone to follow and rotate along the head.
The weird shaped sphere with bits out of it in the center of the head is used to rotate the head around it’s own pivot, to roll on the floor or something when the head is detached.
Thanks for the help!
I’ll show you my animations… When they’re done.
.
.
I owned that level, completed the 00’s, 10’s, 20’s, got to 39, 47, 58, 68, 75, didn’t get very far with the 80’s 
and got to 97.
.
So… many … episodes… so …much…fustration.
I love this rig so much, but the creasing of joints is about to drive me insane!
If there’s anyway to fix that, I’m all ears. Short of making a billion shape keys, that is.
Here’s the first attempt at the animation. As you can see, it sucks. I’m working on it. 
well I sorta fix the creasing by rotating the stretch hands/feet controls. So you don’t have to redo the animation, just add some keys for those controls at certain keyframes and it’ll be fine. At least I think.
I’m at work, and we can’t see youtube here, I’ll check it out when I’m home.
and because it’s too much fun not to:
Shot at 2008-06-10
you can do more than just rotate them to avoid the creasing, you can scale them to make fists, or you can scale them down and move them very close to the shoulder to make it seem as if he’s got one arm less, or a leg etc…
I didn’t put nearly as much testing/tweaking into this one like I did for little_fella, but I’m starting to really like these little “exploits” I find here and there.
Maybe it’s because I hardly animated anything at all, but I don’t think it sucks at all…
It’s a judo roll correct? for a judoroll it’s a little short of a distance,and there is something that looks a little funny in the left leg and a bit less weird in the spine once he gets back up.
but me likes… a lot. once I have the devil rig done I’ll get back to trying some animations again. Now I have a standard to follow.
by the way, the devilrig is basically done. Need to do some tests to be sure everything works, and make another driver for the tail, I guess… sh*t… just remembered something, I think one part of the tail might need to go back to the drawing board…
Well, it’s definitely a work in progress. It’s getting better, but it’s still full of kinks. Normally I don’t think it’d take this long, but I’m very new to animation, and even more so to character animation. Pretty much the only character animation I’ve done before is very basic walkcycles and such.
So I’m getting in way over my head trying to get a grasp on all the basic principles of animation at once, mainly weight and momentum.
As for it being to short… I know it seems like it, but I have if I somehow made it longer, I’d have to make his back slide along the ground. As it is currently the back ‘rolls’ along the ground, more or less.
I’ve improved on it a bit, and I’ve got a second version up: http://youtube.com/watch?v=I6t_IugUSRc
And on the subject of the rig… In the process of animating all this, I’ve noticed a couple kinks. The most noticeable is the shoulder. When just posing the model they’re very nice; easy to control and put where you want. However, in animation they have a knack for moving to places where you didn’t put them, or bending the whole arm into odd shapes. I don’t completely understand how the rig works, so I don’t really know where the root of the problem is, but I think an FK bone parented to the neck would be nice and simple. But like I said, I don’t know much about rigging, so it might be much more complex than that.
And somewhat related to the shoulder issue is how the chest bone moves the shoulders when it’s rotated. While in theory it sounds like a great idea that saves a few actions in getting your shoulders where you want, it often backfires and gives unpredictable results, or extends the shoulders beyond where they should be limited at. The solution is to just restrict the rotation of the chest bone, but I thought I’d mention it for future reference on any rigs you might make.
And one last thing that really confused me is that at random times during the rotation of the head, it would do a complete 360 in the space of one of two frames, but nothing in the IPO chart would show it rotating. Even after I deleted all the IPO curves and redid it, it would re-appear in roughly the same case. I’m not sure if this is a problem with the rig or just a bug in Blender.
But even though I sound like I’m whining, I still love this rig, it’s really fun to animate and despite its simplicity, it looks great.
thank you, now that is some info I can use!
I’ll look into it.
The “backfire” issue for instance is why I removed the stretchy pole parents to begin with, they had that same unpredictable issue.
I’m not sure what is causing the head to twitch like that, but I have an idea what might be causing it, I’ll look into it later, will be thursday evening at earliest.
About your animation:
The short distance issue is way less noticable in your second version imo.
About future rigs:
If anything I’ll be using the proportions and maybe the base rig from this for one or two, or more future rigs I might do. The proportions aren’t randomly chosen.
due to circumstances I was able to work at it this evening, so version 2 of the devilman rig is also released. Downloads at my site.
I haven’t looked into the head twitch and shoulder issues yet. I first wanted to release this stable version with the same and extended featureset as the previous before I start to break things open again and change them. I haven’t forgotten them, I’m going to do some animations with them soon to see how they hold up.
If you don´t mind sending me the animation file btw, I could see where the twitch etc occur, and see how I could fix it. If you don’t mind that is, I might learn some animation from it while I’m at it 
screendump, I’ll make some proper beauty renders soon:
Shot at 2008-06-11
Well, I’ve fixed the neck issue and most of the shoulder issue by just inserting a key at almost every frame, but I can upload the .blend anyway, there might still be some goofy spots for you to look at.
And don’t expect to learn much animation from me, I’ve hardly done any before this.
Checked through the file and the need to put in that many keyframes is just not acceptable in my book. I’ll definitly fix it. I think I’ve solved the shoulder bug, you know the one where the shoulders don’t go where they’re supposed to. I don’t know yet how it will affect deformation, but so far, it looks good. basically, it was cleaning up a few hinges that no longer served a purpose, and caused the shoulder bones to twist rather than rotate along.
Haven’t looked through the head yet, been trying a funny animation of my own. Will be up soon, if youtube will let me…
Hey thanks allot. I am trying to learn rigging properly at the moment. Do you know of a walkthrough tutorial, with step by step instructions for this kind of rig or even a more complex one, including bone layers etc?