Hi, everyone,
I would like to learn how to properly rig mechanical objects using armature. I understanding using bones to do rigging has several advantages over using empties and constraints. I want to start at the beginning, and have watched Chris Kuhn’s video on rigging the jet fighter tutorials and they are great. I saw another tutorial on rigging a backhoe (or excavator) by Jonathan Williamson which is very informative (as all his tutorials tend to be), but it seems to start out a little over my head. I have started a big project working on an F14 Tomcat fighter jet and want to rig and animate everything on it. The landing gear have this articulated arm that contracts and rotates. Can anyone offer any suggestions for an absolute beginner when it comes to rigging?
Walk before you run. You are an absolute beginner and want to start a big project? Do the excavator tutorial. Do one or two more rigging tutorials and save yourself even more hours of headaches (you will inevitably have). Car suspensions for example should be a bit similar. Human legs also.
Google Humane Rigging. You’ll learn how to start with simple rigs and expand from there to full character rigging. Learning about spaces (World ,Local, Transform,etc), rotations (Eulers/ Quaternions), drivers, and constraints. Most of which will be covered in the tutorial I suggested.
Thanks, star player and DanPro! I will check out the Humane Rigging series. I have heard good things about it. My F14 Tomcat project is very long term, and hope to use it as a way to apply what I learn from these other tutorials. Slow and steady going!
When you get around to rigging the complex action of your landing gear, you might like this tutorial I did:
It gives an idea for how to use action constraints in regards to a mechanical movement. (Which makes using an armature worthwhile.) Not sure if it’s ideal, but it’s one way that seems to work well enough for mechanical rigs.
I agree with what everyone else has said, slow and steady, learn what you are doing. Just watching a video tutorial and duplicating what it does isn’t learning, it’s more like copying someone else’s homework. Sure you get the final result, but you didn’t learn how to get the final result. You have to learn the ‘techniques’ of rigging, learning what the constraints (and their various settings) do, the use of extra ‘helper’ bones, how to use drivers and everything you can do with those, and so much more…
It doesn’t matter if you watch a tutorial on rigging a hand & fingers, or rigging an excavator, it’s how it works that’s important. Think about it, you can pretty much move your finger around the same way as an excavator’s boom moves. While you can’t extend your finger, you can curve it like an airplane’s flaps. It’s all kind of the same thing.
At the end of the day, the only difference between mechanical/organic rigging is that organic objects deform, mechanical objects don’t. For mechanical rigging, each part of the mesh that should move with a bone, should be a separate mesh object. Then the mesh object is parented to the bone.
Yes there are many tutorials out there… Humane Rigging …
Start here…
Is one of the best IMHO on Rigging in Blender…
it covers much more than just Rigging Characters…
it Teaches the basics of Rigging in General (that you certainly can take with you to other softwares)…
I also have a few Mechanical Rigging tutorials on my Vimeo site… (see my signature)
also I will argue with those who think that Armatures are the only way to do Mechanical Rigging…
Not so…
there are some Constraints you can’t get to from inside an Armature… and you therefore have to use Empties and objects to access…
Hi, Clockmender! Yup, that’s me. I am using the F14 project as a means to apply what I learn in all things Blender, but now realize with the help of everyone here, that I am going to need to put that on the back burner for the time being and concentrate on some basic rigging. I think the Humane Rigging tutorials look very extensive, so I will be concentrating on them for a while.
Thanks, norvman. I am going to look at your videos. I finished Chris Kuhn’s video on rigging the fighter jet using empties and constraints without an armature. It is starting to seem to me that there is no really hard and fast rule regarding armatures versus empties, and that each case requires some knowledge and experience to get to the most effective solution.
Like anything in 3D animation … there’s a somewhat steep learning curve… once you get past that… most of it’s smooth sailing the rest of the way…
Remember that in Rigging the big deal really is understanding Parenting and how “space” works… Local space… World space… Parent space… etc…
get use to Parenting stuff to something else to change the pivot point for Rotation, Translation and Scale and your half way there already…
But if you’ve spent way too much time pulling hair out because you can’t figure out how to avoid those frakking cyclic dependencies, then armatures does offer one simplified solution that gets around it. With actions you create and manually keyframe an animation strip to define that entire movement. Can be quite complex and even sequential, like a robot transforming, or roof mechanism on a convertable car. The benefit is you only need to do that animation once (if you get it right), and you’re done with it. Then back outside the action, in the main environment or animation, you assign action constraints to those armature components. Then once those are set, you can make robot transform, roof open up and move into place, or even a landing gear go through it’s entire unfolding or retract sequence by one movement on a single slider which is itself animatable. No figuring out what affects what, because all that movement is locked to your action animation. And even then, you can put operation of some constraints under that. (Like the targeting to an empty with that missile launcher thingy I did.)
The only thing is that process isn’t exactly friendly for beginners, and it’s a little tricky to get down even at an intermediate level. I suppose that’s why it’s not seen much outside of cyclic animations or BGE type stuff. Yes it’s a manual way to force a rig to behave as if automated by other constraints, but really useful once you get it figured out.