Hello, all. I’m getting closer to the point where I’ll be rigging my female warrior model (see sig below), and I’m planning on following Tony Mullen’s rigging process for Captain Blender. The issue is that my model is intended to be as close to Spirits Within/Beowulf -realistic as I can make it, while the good Captain is more of a 'toon style character. As for use: I intend to use her as a CG element in a live-action film, so she needs to move like a human woman…although, rather than trying to cross the “Uncanny Valley,” I’m going to be playing within it, so it won’t be necessary or desirable to make her truly photorealistic. Also, I’m using this first character as a means to learn all of the steps in character creation, start to finish, so I’m creating everything from scratch. For the other charcters, I’ll probably use jbouza’s Blenrig and makehuman models as a basis, but for now, I need to understand the process, and I’m not on a timeline.
So, for those who’ve had more experience with this sort of process:
- Is the Captain Blender rig flexible enough to act as a good basis for a near-realistic character? It certainly seems like it is, but I’d rather not learn that it isn’t after I’ve built the whole rig, weight-painted, yadda yadda. (I’m aware that there will be a number of adjustments, like muscle deformations and the oft-cited shoulder issues with realistic models - for those sorts of issues, I have plenty of threads to follow and other rigs to look at.)
- Have there been recent changes to Blender that make some of the steps either unecessary or easier? (Bone heat comes to mind, but I’m talking about things that are more specific to Mr. Mullen’s methods that might not be obvious, like “Oh, you don’t need to make an Action and driver for the foot rig anymore, that’s done with the new x-feature.”)
- Are there things that have become “broken,” ala ManCandy, with the revisions to 2.46? Are there any pitfalls that have come to light since the book was released and 2.46 has been released that might not be obvious to a newcomer to rigging?
Thanks for any advice you can lend.