Cartoon Guy Rig

Artwork Finished Projects
1

Hey Blender Artists,

This is Cartoon Guy (name is subject to change… possibly). I built him for maybe entering the 11 second club or any other animation purposes.

He’s on blendswap here:
http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/characters/cartoon-guy-v1-0/

Feel free to use him in your animations as well. It would be really cool to see him animated by others on the 11 second club or anywhere else on the web.

I’d also like to hear your feedback on the face rig. I can’t take credit for the rest of the rig, rigify helped me out there. I also used Nathan Vegdahl’s jaw rig, it works very nicely with lip syncing. I used bone controlled lattices for the mouth and then used action constraints to make it easier to form smiles and frowns and other mouth shapes. Please critique this set up. I strongly believe in constructive criticism. The primary face controls are on layer 3 and the secondary controls are on layer 19.

Happy Blending!

Attachments

CartoonGuyMontage.png720×540 166 KB

2

holy crap i wish i could model this well… thank you perfect for practicing my movements

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thanks, I have him and will give him a look.

4

Thanks for your kind words. The spine rig is from the rigify add-on. Nathan Vegdahl made it for the rig of Sintel. He put only 1 control in because it would be easier to animate. He put some really neat features in it as well. You can read about it here: http://www.sintel.org/news/durian-rigging-01/

You have a point though, it would be nice to have a little more control for followthrough. I did study the spine rig Nathan made thoroughly and made one on my own from scratch. I felt weird using it without knowing how to build it myself. There are 2 bones for the spine, its just that he used copy rotation constraints so that 1 control would move both. With that I’m pretty sure there’s a way to animate the 2 bones separately. I’ll try to work out a layer of secondary controls for more fluidity.

As for the head control: You are right with what you said about using the lattice. Its just kind of tricky to set up, it was hard for me at first and its still a little confusing to me now. The way I it is I made a lattice for the head and parented it to the bone that deforms the head. Then I made hooks to deform the lattice and then used bones do move the hooks by parenting the hooks to bones (the thing about these bones is they half to be in the exact position of the hooks). To make this less confusing(hopefully) I’ll call these bones “hook bones”. Then I made a stretch bone which I parented the hook bones to. After that I put a control bone at the tip of the stretch bone and made the stretch bone stretch to that control bone with a stretch to constraint. Now the armature controls the head lattice. To make the lattice deform the characters head I painted a vertex group made up of the vertices of the head. Then I added a lattice modifier to the character (after the armature modifier in the modifier stack) and made it only deform the vertex group I painted. Then for the other objects (the hair, teeth, and tongue) I gave lattice modifiers as well. I think thats pretty much it. I’m not sure of how well I explain things so sorry if this is confusing. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

By the way I downloaded your matt rig, I love the design and the textures you put on there. The video you did looked good too. The only thing is the shape keys don’t work on the rig when I try to use it. Good work though.

5

draguu,

this video helped me out a lot with the lattice thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDqFcQ_YBCk&feature=BFa&list=PL5643529BBE9522A1&index=34

also the other videos in the playlist have a lot of tips on rigging.

6

Great Rig ! Although I agree with Aligorith’s comments here:

7

Great rig, thanks a lot for sharing

8

Great work, lots to learn

9

Thanks for making him public domain with the ZERO license.

This means he can be used in commercial projects.

10

Lovely rig. Thanks for sharing.

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thnks dude … i gt it what you said …ill try that lattice rig in my next release … and ya sorry for the face rig in matt …
i have just fixed that thing … now you can download matt’s rig from

face controls are very friendly in my way … as you can see in demo video … try it out your self …

hope you like it … thnks dude…

once again congrats u did a gr8 job there …

tc

12

Nice model, but the rig…
Well, I’m not a fan of the floating face controls. Since all the rigify generated buttons are in the N menu, why not have the face control sliders there as well? Even better, why not have the controls (or as many as possible) on the face?
Also, the rigify generated UI panel can be customised to be more user friendly…

class RigLayers(bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'UI'
    bl_label = "Rig Layers"
    bl_idname = rig_id + "_PT_rig_layers"

    @classmethod
    def poll(self, context):
        try:
            return (context.active_object.data.get("rig_id") == rig_id)
        except (AttributeError, KeyError, TypeError):
            return False

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        col = layout.column()

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=0, toggle=True, text='Body')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=2, toggle=True, text='Face / Head')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=4, toggle=True, text='Hands')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=5, toggle=True, text='Hands extra')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=6, toggle=True, text='L arm FK')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=7, toggle=True, text='L arm IK')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=8, toggle=True, text='R arm FK')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=9, toggle=True, text='R arm IK')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=10, toggle=True, text='L leg FK')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=11, toggle=True, text='L leg IK')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=12, toggle=True, text='R leg FK')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=13, toggle=True, text='R leg IK')

        row = col.row()
        row.prop(context.active_object.data, 'layers', index=28, toggle=True, text='Root')

BTW, the head and kneck control should be on the same layer as the body/spine controllers, not the face controllers. In terms of work flow, this grouping works better.

Also, I agree with the other posters that the ribcage control is too low at the moment. (I think it’s too low on the rigify’s default human meta rig as well.)
I know there’s a bit of debate on this, but I’m not a fan of the 2 controller spine rig. It’s way too limiting. For the Sintel rig, Nathan added an “extra” layer with 4 bones for the spine so that you can go in and tweak on a finer level. Unfortunately the rigify spine doesn’t have this. (I think a new rigify template is required… )

Anyway, back on topic…
Like I said, this is a cool model and a great start. Keep up the good work!

13

Great!I’m downloading it. Thanks for sharing

14

Just fooling around for a minute, but a couple of things:

Agree with Fweeb, my preference for face controls is broad controls on one layer and fine controls on another, and I prefer them on-face. The actual shapes themselves are very well done and fun to play with, but in my old age I can’t read the controls and the slider targets are tiny!

Also, it would be nice to have a good rendering setup ready to go in the file- your renders look great, but all I got was a gray field when I F12’ed. Setting up the camera/lighting like the pic above would be more conducive to users focusing on the rig itself.

He’s a great looking character tho!

15

i really like this character. cute deformations too, especially the smile looks kinda like Woody from Toy Story.

i also like the way you’ve rigged the eyelids. i’ve had trouble in the past with closed eyelid shapekeys, so i like bones for eyelids. where did you learn this eyelid rig? or is this your own idea? i’d like to replicate it, can you point me to a tutorial by any chance?

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lol i like the top left face :smiley:

17

I love it. I started off cartooning and have just made the jump to CG in the past couple of years. Your rig is a great marriage of the two art forms.

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Hey mjedewaard!
Nice work here. It’s great to see that Rigify is useful to someone other than just myself. :wink:

I would recommend renaming the rig layers to be more descriptive than just numbers. Right now you have to dive into the generated python code (“rig_ui.py”) to do that. Making this process less painful is on the Rigify to-do list (sorry!).

Also, it’s really cool to see the jaw rig get used! I haven’t had the chance to use it in a real rig yet, so I am glad you have. :slight_smile:

Finally, as Aligorith already noted in his post, it would be good to allow the eye target to optionally follow the head. (Me thinks I need to add some new rig types to rigify for eyes and jaws…)

Anyhoo, great work! I look forward to seeing some animation done with this. :slight_smile:

19

There are already two controls (one for hips, one for chest). What you want is a third control. :wink:

But (less pedantically) yes, I agree. You can do some follow through with more obscure features of the spine rig, but I agree that it is hardly ideal. Especially for characters with very flexible spines (cats, for example) this spine rig is quite limiting. I certainly intend to improve the spine rig in the future, adding a third control in the middle. Hopefully I will have time for this sooner rather than later.

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(cough cough dragons cough cough)