First attempt at full rig...help!

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

dietrich textured.jpg2000×2000 336 KB

Hello peoples. I made this little robot dude yesterday called Dietrich. Been pulling my hair out a little bit trying to work out rigging etc. I’m so almost there but am getting some really unexpected behaviour.

Something in particular happens when i move the IK bone on the left arm, well there is not much movement at all (as there is with the right arm which seems to be working alright).

When i move the spine bone in the middle you can see there is some problem around the wrist control in the left hand, i have searched and searched for a solution but just cannot see.

If someone could take just a couple of minutes to look at the problem for me i would be eternally grateful!

Blend file is here

#2

Well, the whole layout is kind of wrong. I don’t know if that’s just because you’ve been messing with things trying to make it work.

Your arms’ IK bone targets are children of the arms. That creates a loop-- it can’t figure out where the targets are until it finds out where the arms are and it can’t figure out where the arms are until it figures out where the targets are. So, first, unparent your IK bones.

That leaves you with the fact that your wrists are parented to your IK bones. So reparent those to your forearms.

Now. All that done, you have an issue with the robot’s right arm because you have locked the X and Z axes of your upper arm. Unlock that to enable rotation like you have on the left. (Properties-> bone-> inverse kinematics.)

Now, I don’t see any issue with the middle spine bone (spine.002), it doesn’t seem to do anything differently than the other spine bones. Maybe when you take care of these issues, that’ll disappear, or maybe you can be more specific or give an image.

So all that done for your arms, you need to do the same for the legs. Don’t forget to parent the upper legs to your spine so that they’ll actually follow the model.

#3

I can’t help with the blend file (wouldn’t consider myself skilled enough), but if you haven’t seen the Humane Rigging tutorials - I would be willing to bet they will help you build a great rig for your character. Plus they do a great job of explaining why.

#4

Thank you very much!

I really appreciate that all explained for me. Yes I changed a load of stuff while messing around. I wasn’t able to find any tutorials to do exactly what I wanted to so it was a lot of trial and error to even get this far. Hopefully I can iron out all the mess now. Thanks again!

#5

bandages - you are a savior, that all really helped! Thanks again :slight_smile:

#6

cadaei - thanks very much for the link, will check it out!

#7

Happy to be of some use, I’m sure we’ve all made some bad IK bones.

#8

bandages - haha yes i’m sure. :slight_smile: Your advice helped so much. I doubt my rig is perfect, but I was at least able to render out an animation test of some basic movements - next is the hands!

#9

Okay, i’m a lot further on with this now than I was but am coming across more problems I could do with some more advice on. I’ve uploaded my blendfile here, though suddenly it shot up from around 90Mb to 170Mb.

I think I keep confusing my bone hierarchy etc as i’m not entirely sure the best way to do things yet (seen lots of various demo videos but for my particular robot i had to cobble together advice from various sources).

At the moment I have it set up that when i move the spine bones i can kinda pick my character up ragdoll style, all of his bones are effected by this (which i want/like) but when i try to assign the IK foot control bones to the foot mesh, i lose the previous connection of the foot to the spine bone movement.

A little tricky to explain but if someone has 5 minutes and wouldn’t mind putting me on the right track it would once again be very helpful and really aid my learning curve here…

I’ve been trying for the past 7 hours or so and just cannot get past this hurdle!

blend file:

#10

Why is your arm IK target parented to your arm? Why is your foot parented to your foot IK target?

> when i try to assign the IK foot control bones to the foot mesh

Are you talking about weighting to the IK targets? Why would you do that? Don’t do that.

Download a model from blendswap that has IKs, or make a quick Rigify rig, and take a look at the armatures. Copy them. When you understand what’s happening, then you can stop copying and start getting creative.

#11

[QUOTE=bandages;3287772]Why is your arm IK target parented to your arm? Why is your foot parented to your foot IK target?

> when i try to assign the IK foot control bones to the foot mesh

Are you talking about weighting to the IK targets? Why would you do that? Don’t do that.

Haha…oh bandages, there you are. I don’t know. Just took ages to get this far an kept trying to tweak and improve and got myself into chaos.

You think i’d be best to start over?

#12

No, it doesn’t matter if you start over or not. Although I think in a few months you’ll say to yourself, “Start over from what?” What you’re best off doing now is studying and copying a model that animates the way you’d like your model to animate. It will be more time-effective, not just for finishing this project but also for your learning, than the time you’re putting in every time you get stuck someplace.

What you’ve done isn’t a waste, but not because of the armature. What you’ve done is learn where to look for important bone characteristics. Parents, IK angle limits, constraints. Now you’re ready to study other models. Before, you wouldn’t have known how to.

#13

Thanks Bandages, yes you’re right, i think before I might have been too confused!

Will try to study other armatures though i’m not sure if i’ll find one that moves just like I want mine to, but hopefully I can work it out :slight_smile: