I have been learning and learning and… getting stuck.
My first question is hard to ask because I dont know what Im trying to do is called, but I will put in a picture to help…
Here’s the problem:
I made a person, made a rig for it, and everything went pretty well considering, but the hands came out funny.
Some of the bones work fine, like the index finger they all line up in the way one would expect a finger bone to line up, the next finger over, the middle and so on the bones are not lined up, they need to be rotated but I can’t get it to happen correctly. if you look at the picture you will see that the round control thingy is off by about 45 degrees or so, and to bend the finger correctly is a LOT of tedious screwing around. How do I correct this? , I have even tried making a whole new rig but it actually comes out worse.
The next question is even harder as I dont know what any of the correct terms are, but how do I attach things, like say clothing, or hair, fluid simulation, or another rigged object to this in its currently rigged state? I have tried all sorts of things but I dont know what its called to attach two objects to each other, and Join didnt work, in fact I dont think it did anything.
OK. First things first. Go back into pose mode and clear all bone motions out. Alt R, Alt G, Alt S. Then go to object mode and make sure your armature has applied your scale. Control A rotation and scale. Then Put your armature origin at the center. Your mesh is already at the center. Now your ready. If you don’t do this, you will have issues down the road sometimes that are hard to trace. On your mesh you may want to add a few edge loops on your joints where your bone bends to help with deformation. I added three loop cuts on two joints for you on the middle finger of your left hand. Next set your bones correctly. You can select the middle loop on the mesh in edit mode, cursor to selected. That puts the cursor in the middle of the loop you just selected. Tab out to object, select your armature, tab to edit, select the joint and then shift S, selection to cursor. That positions your joint in the middle of the mesh for you. You need to do it for both joints on each bone. Do that for all your joints. Now to straighten out your bones in your hand. Select your bone in edit mode. Set your TRANSFORM space to normal , and turn on your widget for transform and you get a nice guideline for your “bone roll”. You want your local X axis to bend the way you want your finger to move. Adjust your view on that one bone so your looking exactly down on the finger and adjust your bone roll. (Control R) so that your x axis aligns with the way you want your finger to bend. Then check it from the side. You need to do this for all your bones, not just the fingers. That way your local X rotation for the bones will make sense and your fingers will work. Be sure your Z axis for all bones points the same because that will determine either plus or minus on your rotation. Make them consistent for each side. Here’s the file for one bone, the middle one fixed in the left hand finger. You can now fix the rest. You can google blender bone roll and find a few shortcuts.
If your going to rig a lot, I would suggest you get Humane Rigging which you can get for a few bucks from the Blender Foundation. Or even better if you can afford it is to take one of the rigging courses that Blender Cookie puts out. I’ve always found these very good to get you going.
Your other issue is adding the armature to multiple parts which you should be able to google. If not post your blend with the parts.
Just remember I’m stilltrying on a lot of things myself. Here is another link that may help you when you import files from makehuman. Also there are a lot of people that may see this that are far better than I am at figuring out these things.
Thanks! Im not using MakeHuman, I made this myself in Sculptris and ZBrush, then did the rigging in Blender which, like you I guess Im still learning, but Im a few lightyears behind you I suspect!
So.
Last night and today I learned that my rig not only sucks, it sucks so loud the people on the international space station have to wear ear plugs to get any sleep, and NASA is contemplating using suction as a means of propulsion for faster than light travel.
Meanwhile I am going to re-rig this (and everything else I do from now on) starting from scratch using those wonderful videos as a guide.
Thank you all VERY VERY VERY MUCH!
