Greetings fellow blenders 
I am working on setting up a photoreal T-rex (modified from the one on the blender model repository) for a project I’m doing. In the spirit of the open source movement, I’ll throw the improved model up there when I’m finished with the project. Anyway, I just finished with the armature and It would be really nice if someone more educated than myself at character rigging (Esp. with the new animation system) could look at it and give me some suggestions. I just want to make sure I didn’t make any terrible mistakes in setting up the armature that will kill us when we go to animate. Keep in mind that the mesh is still a proxy mesh – it isn’t really properly constrained to the armature yet, I’m waiting to see if I have the bones set up correctly first.
Here’s the blend file!
Looks good so far. You can get rid of those Empties though, just delete them from the Target field in the constraint then you can grab the constraint bone itself.
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I find that using Empties is actually pretty helpful for animating your rig. I recommend you keep them in there.
A couple notes:
-Your eyes and upper teeth should probably be parented to the head bone (they’re currently unparented).
-You may want to play with the chain length on some of your IK. If you intend for the head to rotate when the feet lift, what you have is okay, but it’s not particularly real looking. Weight doesn’t quite shift like that.
-The tail deformation does something a bit odd to the T-Rex’s abdomen. Adjusting your chain length, envelopes, and maybe doing a little weight painting should help here.
All in all, not a horrible start. Keep working on it.
Hey, thanks for the replies guys! I’m going to post the new improved rig up here as soon as I can. Fligh %, I was unable to figure out how to do IK without empties…Is there another way I’m not aware of? (I’m not too well versed in character animation in blender…how do you usually set up your IK chain?)
Fweeb, when you mention chain length, are you refering to the size of each bone or something different? I agree that the head rotating when the hips move isn’t desireable but I am not sure how to solve it …could you explain this a bit more? As for the mesh parenting issues, I’ll iron those out once the armature is working as it should be. Thanks so much for the help guys!
-Trev
Select a bone, Ctrl-I and choose ‘Targetless’. Or add a Constraint in the Constraints tab and don’t fill in a target (don’t worry about the red bar either).
when you mention chain length,
In the Constraint tab ‘Chain Length’ is set to zero (which means it goes to the chain root). You can set how many bones to use.
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