Rigging Advice for Beginner!

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi all!
I need some advice! I’m trying to rig a humanoid character that is clothed in a head-to-toe loosely fitted cloak with hood. Also, the character is a spirit, so you don’t actually see a body under the cloak. Initially I rigged the humanoid shaped cloak with a normal biped rig, and tried weight painting the mesh/cloak to make it seem like there were limbs underneath when walking, but that became extremely frustrating quickly.
Since my team is planning on using Physx for the cloak’s physics in engine, I was thinking the best way to go about this is to maybe put an actual human body mesh underneath the cloak, don’t texture it at all, use it for collision in Physx, and just animate the “invisible” biped underneath (letting Physx animate the cloak).

My questions to you guys are:

  1. Would this work and/or give the effect I’m looking for?
  2. Anyone have any advice with rigging in Blender in preparation for Physx addon in UE4? maybe shed some light as to your workflow? do you animate without the clothes and leave all the cloth work for Physx?

Any help/advice would be appreciated! I am new to rigging/animation =)

Thank you for your time!

Runaround5ue

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Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Animation and Rigging”

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Thank You!

4

Cmon people =)

Any advice at all about how you would approach this is welcome!

5

The best advice I can give you is to buy the Humane Rigging DVD (or the download version if it’s still offered). It’s the best introduction to rigging and takes you right through to really advanced techniques. Excellent stuff. Nathan Vegdahl is by far one of the best tutorial presenters in the biz. After doing his course, I rigged a hospital bed that mimicked the real thing in every possible way. As well, I was able to rip the rigify rig apart and combine it with a bouncing ball rig to create a reusable rig for my ball characters in Sackadoo. You can see one of them here. Further down the page, I have him posed.

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Thank you for your suggestion! I will check it out =)