So I’m still working on this character for animation.
I’m still not finished and that’s why I like to ask for suggestions and directions on things I’m a bit confused:
So as you can see his proportions are not so like a normal human, I chose to design him with the small head, small legs and huge arms and hands, so far so good I’m happy with him.
Now… the rigging confusion:
I’m guessing that I will just add a simple basic armature and do the skinning (that will probably be HELL) but that’s not the issue, I hope so…
I’m wondering about EXTRA stuff. starting with the HUGE shoulder-pads I’ve added. (Not finished yet but you get the idea for the size and such).
How do I rig the shoulder pads?
for now they are separate objects (shoulder-pad Left + Right).
Do I Join them to the main character and rig the all thing with extra bones on the armature?
or is there a better way?
For example… maybe parenting it to specific bone (like a shoulder) so I don’t need to worry about skinning it and I also have option to remove it on the future.
What should I do, and please consider I’m a Blender noob I don’t have much experience in this.
Sorry about my bad English and thanks ahead for your help!
Rigging this character with a simple basic armature will be HELL! You will encounter problems that you’ve probably not thought even about yet. First off, your shoulder topology is all off. It looks like the arms have just been extruded from the chest. Blender cookie has a decent video tutorial on shoulder topology, you might want to look at that, you’ll have to search their site for it. Now if you don’t understand spoken engish, the video still has a bit to offer you. It shows edgeloops in the shoulder area by colors. It will give you a view of how the edges must flow in the shoulder area to get good deformation.
The shoulder is the hardest area of the body to get to deform properly because of the wide range of motion. No other joint in the body is as complex as the shoulder. To give you a chance at getting mesh to work correctly, fix up the topology to match what the Blender cookie video shows. Sorry I don’t have a link to the video…
The face, head and legs will probably rig ok, shouldn’t have a problem, but the massive body is going to be a big problem. That big body with a skinny little armature inside will just collapse in on itself as it’s rotated and twisted. Trust me on this, I rigged a fat fish once, and couldn’t the body to deform correctly with just a simple armature. You will need to use the Mesh Deform Modifier to get this big body to deform correctly. It’s a bit of work to set up, but works really well for something like this. I have video tutorials in english online showing how to set it up of the fat fish I used it on. Let me know and I will post links to those videos if you want to see them…
I’m wondering about EXTRA stuff. starting with the HUGE shoulder-pads I’ve added. (Not finished yet but you get the idea for the size and such).
How do I rig the shoulder pads?
for now they are separate objects (shoulder-pad Left + Right).
Do I Join them to the main character and rig the all thing with extra bones on the armature?
or is there a better way?
For example… maybe parenting it to specific bone (like a shoulder) so I don’t need to worry about skinning it and I also have option to remove it on the future.
What should I do, and please consider I’m a Blender noob I don’t have much experience in this.
Rig the shoulder pads with their own bone that is a child of the shoulder bone and they will move as the shoulder moves and allow you to pose the pads as well.
The mesh deform modifier might make that huge body deform ok without changing the body topology. It does make bad topology sometimes look good…
Thank you for your opinions and tips Randy!
Not only the shoulder extruded from the chest but the all character started from a box (besides the head I used polysphere and joined + merged).
I know how the topology needs to work for a shoulder basically and TRUE! this is way wrong… but as I said it’s just a work in progress I have lots of things to fix, tweak and add, I agree 100% with the things you’ve mentioned and can see the big problems to come.
It will be very kind to show the videos about the mesh deform modifier, I’ve never used it before as I’m a Blender noob. sounds interesting. Thank you for your time, I appreciate it
The videos are in english and move at a slower speed than some blender video tutorials. They are all recorded as I was working, and my work was slowed down because I was trying to describe what I was doing as I worked. So you should be able to follow along without a lot of trouble. 3 videos total.
1st video, create the deform cage:
2nd video, controlling the deform cage with an armature & binding the mesh to the cage:
3rd video, setting the deform modifier to only affect parts of the mesh:
You basically build a cage around the mesh, You control the cage with the armature and the cage deforms the mesh. The closer the cage is to the mesh, the more control the cage has over the mesh. Look at the original docs and notice the pic with the 2 arms, look at the cage around the arms to understand.
I would do with your model like I do in the 3rd video above, exclude the head from being affected by the mesh deform, and just rig it out…
The deform cage does not need to cover the entire character. The legs shouldn’t need the deform cage and could be rigged with out it, end the cage at the crotch. They look thin and not bulked up. so use normal rigging and mix it with the cage like the 3rd video.
It isn’t as hard as it sounds… Post your problems here and I’ll answer them…
