mtracer. thank you very much for your opinion. Believe me I have tried to make character appealing, at the same time this is also personal issue. As you have mentioned MooM as an example for me (personally) he is not the cutest man :-)))
Concerning the GUI this was rather experiment. In Blender 2.5 it will be possible I believe to have switches directly in UI thanks to its possible customizability.
Hey, I just wanted to add that the spine has some flipping problems. Currently it seems very stable. However, the spine twists 180 when it goes upside down. I have a little technique that maybe you can flesh out and use.
Just take the bone chain that defines the spine motion and use an IK constraint on each bone, targeted to the bone above it. Use the DoF to lock x and z rotation. Also, allow Rot and set the weight to one. Play around with the influence of each bone to get an even twist distribution. If you need more explanation, maybe I can make a proof of concept. I don’t really know what the limits are of this technique, but I think that with IK it should be able to go inverted.
Just a thought,
MTracer.
Thank you very much for testing the rig. I will look at this issue. Probably incorrect parenting and maybe better to change tract to constraint in shoulder with IK constraint to avoid 180 twist problem.
Good hints, I hope to post corrected testing file tomorrow.
Downloads are not working!!??
//rbn
Are not, -rbn- ? I have just test it and they work ok. Just press the link, choose Free user, wait a moment and here you go.
mtracer, it took some time but I hope to solve the problem. Now George can be animation fine even if rotated upside down (180 degrees) for example for walkcycle on the ceiling :-).
Please could you test the WIP file first if this is what you wanted so I can consider it ready to be officially updated?
http://rapidshare.com/files/264652674/WIP_George_1.3.blend
Thank you very much.
There is new version of the rig George rig 1.3
Details in a first post. Thank to all animators for reporting issues.
No, this isn’t exactly what I had had in mind. The spine works if the entire rig is rotated upside down, but you can’t rotate only the torso upside down. Oh, and I don’t want to animate upside down walkcycles, I would just like a rig that I can trust to go upside down for flips and somersaults and generic body mechanics work.
I picked apart 1.3 and I have a better explanation. You need to duplicate the DEF_Spine bone chain. The original chain should still deform and move like normal. But, you must now delete all the constraints on the original chain. Name the duplicate chain DEF_SpineCurve. Make the Spine bones copy the location, rotation,(only X and Z) and scale, using Copy Location, Copy Rotation and Copy Scale constraints. Constrain them to their respective DEF_SpineCurve bones. Then, add an IK constraint to the DEF_Spine6 bone targeted at the SholderIK control. Allow target rotation and disable stretch. Set the chain length to one. Then constrain DEF_Spine5 to DEF_Spine6 in the same way. Continue down the spine chain until every bone is IK-ed to the bone above it. That should evenly distribute the twist.
The Influence of the IK constraints should not be the same on each bone. Experiment with different distributions of influence to get it to interpolate the twist correctly.
Here’s a little trick. Animate a cube on one axis between zero and one and use the IPO editor to create the correct influence falloff. Then, move forward a frame and copy the cubes position into the influence of the next bone. It’s pretty cool!
Just another thought,
MTracer.
mtracer, I believe this is just the question of using right switches. George rig controls follow quite standard philosophy you can find in many infamous (Maya) rigs. So I am really not sure to make any changes you have mentioned because I am of opinion that they would break the rig.
Animating the flip for example or rotating torso, while root bone stays planted in the ground is really simple and there is no flipping. Please study this file as an example:
http://rapidshare.com/files/265901558/mtracer_George_1.3.blend
Another nice example for flips would be to change legs to FK (more natural for flip animation) as well as have arms to hinge with FK torso, of course neck and head should follow rotation of FK torso.
EDIT: here is the example file for second possibility:
http://rapidshare.com/files/265897451/mtracer2_George_1.3.blend
I hope this helps to understand how to animate the rig. Maybe I may include some comments to manual next time.
Anyway I am looking for your tests of possible updates of the spine rig as you have mentioned hereabove and will be ready to test them if you upload them. You should also remember that there is a combination of FK an IK spine within the torso rig. I really recommend these two Autodesk tutorials as well:
http://store.autodesk.com/DRHM/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayProductDetailsPage&SiteID=adsk&Locale=en_US&Env=BASE&productID=81355100
http://store.autodesk.com/DRHM/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayProductDetailsPage&SiteID=adsk&Locale=en_US&Env=BASE&productID=81355200
Ciao!
JiriH
mtracer, I have just found your animation blog. Nice entry for 11 second club 
Major bug! I was animating my entry for august, and I realized that the action constraints get corrupted if you save out an animation file, and reopen it. This hasn’t destroyed a lot of work, but I would like to see it fixed real soon.
Basically, I linked the George rig into the scene, with relative paths. I created my first pose, saved and went to bed. Next morning I opened the file, and all the action constraints on the finger bones had lost the names of their actions! All the actions on the face were gone as well! The original rig file itself still has the actions, but they’re a little bit buggy. I’m using version 1.2.
Open the Rig file, Ctrl-Click on every bone layer so that the dot becomes black. I had a similar experience (with PyConstraints), but after locking the layers it did not happen again. I do think it is a bug, but i found my way around (i reported it to the bugtracker anyhow). Hope that helps.
Sweet! Thanks, LooLarge! JiriH, maybe you should lock all those bone layers. I’ve noticed that a lot of other rigs have them locked, and I’ve never had a problem like this before.
Thank you very much for pointing this out. I was not aware of this Blender bug.
So it is nice that there is this overcome. Sure I will lock bone layers to avoid the bug.
hello,
That rig is awesome thanks for sharing!
I would like to know how you get that silhouette screen? that is very handy and I would like to use in my other animation projects
thanks a lot
Hi, I am happy you are enjoying the rig.
The silhouette is quite simple to set up. For a 3d window Draw type use Textured and have no lights in this layer where you want only silhouetted objects.
Edit: Oh, I have forget important thing, you have to unwrap your object (method and layout does not matter) and use black texture.
I still cant rotate george in z axis his torso doesnot move