I am just starting to get my feet wet with rigging (working on my first scratch-built rig right now), but I saw a post on animator Keith Lango’s blog about a new rigging approach he is using - http://www.keithlango.com/wordpress/?p=457
Essentially, he is arguing against the use of a GUI to control a complex rig and instead rely on small proxy objects that you can quickly grab and move like a stop motion puppet. The post includes a couple of videos and his general thoughts on rigging characters. I believe he is using Maya, but the issues are relevant to most 3D packages I would think.
Now I know it’s possible to grab bones in Blender even when a mesh is visible, so can this approach he is explaining work for rigs in Blender?
It would be quite nice if there was a way to rig a character with helper objects that are that accessible like the ones seen there. I often find myself jumping in and out of wireframe mode just like this guy mentions.
Turn on F9->X-ray mode for the armature if you want to see it through the mesh. I like using stick bones for animating.
Blender also can substitute custom shapes for bones, like the proxy objects Lango describes. Make sure “Draw Shapes” is on in the Armature panel. Create the mesh you’d like to substitute for the bone’s appearance; for example you might make a big ring for the hip bone. Select the bone, and in the Armature Bones panel -> Ob: field type the name of the mesh.
Add small objects and then make them drivers for the bone rotations or displacements. In Stop Staring, the author’s final face rig uses a combination of slider objects set up as a GUI, and a number of grab and move objects set near the facial feature they animate. Seems to be the best of both worlds.
He animates in passes, and the Gui sliders do the overall (symmetrical) face animation, while the grab and move objects usually do the assymetrical flourishes added in a later pass.
I imagine moving a whole character would be similar to moving a face, some things would be more convenient with a gui, some with individual grab and move objects. For example: a character wearing a dress, the whole skirt moves along with the hip rotation, but the lower edges and folds are swirled around with a grab and move.
Thanks for the link to Calvin’s work, that looks interesting. I will have to download his blends and take a look.
Hopefully Keith will post more info about his rigging work on his blog soon. I highly recommend his site to anyone interested in animation who’s not already reading it. He posts some great stuff.
Apparently, part of his process is a Maya script called zooTriggered (there is a bunch of info on it here). Anybody know if there is something comparable for Blender as either a feature or a script? Again, please forgive my ignorance as I am really just starting to learn to rig in Blender.
Well, that’s what I’ve been doing the entire time I’ve been using blender, so yeah, it’s possible. Driven actions, object bones, all the little constraints and bone layers and what-not provide all the tools you’ll need, and most of them are very easy to set up. Actually, if you’ll hold on a bit, I’m almost done setting up the bone objects for this rig I’m working on
Driven actions, object bones, all the little constraints and bone layers and what-not provide all the tools you’ll need, and most of them are very easy to set up. Actually, if you’ll hold on a bit, I’m almost done setting up the bone objects for this rig I’m working on
If you’re interested, all these things (and a lot more) are covered in my book, which will be out in a couple weeks. Check out the link in my sig.
I don’t discuss the Mancandy rig per se, but I do discuss a number of tricks used in rigging the characters from Elephants Dream (Bassam Kurdali, director of ED and creator of Mancandy is one of the technical editors of the book). I also go through the entire process of creating a full character rig based on the Jason Pierce’s Ludwig rig (and somewhat on Mancandy also). There’s also a lot more, including a look at some of the really cool rigging techniques used in Plumiferos.
