Hello all, well I think I’ve finally done it – I’m starting to embrace Blender. I’ve looked at Blender a number of times over the years but I have always been put off by the interface and those wee buttons with the wee text sitting on them. So what happened – I saw ‘Elephants Dream’ which made me think maybe Blender is serious about 3D character animation. Ok maybe I’m a bad animator, blaming my own tools, but I have used Poser, XSI, and Carrara over the years. These programs are either no use for creating your own stylized characters, too difficult to use, or simply not sophisticated enough. They either have painfully slow development times or no upgrade path. Basically I’ve been frustrated for quite a while now. I recently bought Carrara, this is a really nice program, but the rigging possibilities just aren’t that developed yet. Blender may well be the program that sits in between XSI and Carrara – just what I’ve been looking for.
I love the community feel of Blender and I think its development couldn’t go any quicker (or could it). So I hope Blender will help me to achieve some of the projects that are floating around in my head – I need to get them out before I forget them.
Ok so here’s my real question who are the people here in the forum that are interested in character rigs and are at the cutting edge of Blender’s rigging capabilities – I would like to know them and get up to speed as soon as I can.
Cheers
who are the people here in the forum that are interested in character rigs and are at the cutting edge of Blender’s rigging capabilities – I would like to know them and get up to speed as soon as I can.
Hi Bugman 2000 thanks for your links – I found these two chaps (and others) a while ago, they’re very good. I’m really looking for more people in the forum who are actively experimenting with there own rigs – I want to find people who wish to get the best out of Blenders character rigging capabilities and are actively posting their results.
Well, there are a lot of skilled folks in here. I’m sure you’ll find them. Both of the creators of the rigs I pointed to are regular posters in here and often answer questions.
those wee buttons with the wee text sitting on them.
By the way, you can adjust the size of the buttons with Ctrl-MMB.
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I do have to say though that both the Mancandy and Ludwig rig are full of great features of Blender rigging and both are worth properly studying. They’ve got a variety of IPO drivers, they’ve got action constraints and other constraints used in clever ways, Mancandy has custom bone shapes, all in all really cool stuff… and so if you haven’t tried rebuilding them both up from scratch I’d recommend giving that a try if rigging is what you’re into.
Hi, yes I’m trying to pull apart these rigs but I’m still trying to find my way around the interface (only been using Blender for a week). Mancandy I think is the rig I would like to do an animation with but he’s in a strange pose at the moment and I can’t find out how you get him back to a default pose. It was easy to do this in Poser, you just entered ‘0’ into all the body parts.
In blender you select all the bones and click
ALt+G for Clear Location
ALt+R for Clear Rotation
anyways, just click “pose” and pick one of the clear transformation properties.
Edit: DANG IT, looks like AndyD beat me to the answers
