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
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.
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).
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?
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).
@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?
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.
@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.
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
@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.