Game Rigging & Animation Tutorial Session (ATT: Cessen!)

Background:
Working on my indie game project some more and we’re at the delivery stage for some of the characters and their animations from a guy in the US I hired (mate of mine).

The animations are coming out pretty “meh” due to the bad export functionality of the applications used. I’d like to clean them up in Blender - a task which, while time consuming, is something I kind of wanted to do anyway. The issue is that Collada imported animations come as raw bones+transforms - there is no “rig”.

And I suck at putting together character rigs designed for games.

I am, frankly, in love with the rigs Nathan Vegdahl has put out. They’re neat, flexible, efficient, and (most importantly) they work bloody well. A few people have made similar rigs which shows their popularity outside my enormous fanbase of one :stuck_out_tongue:

The one problem I’ve been having with them is they are an absolute @#$%& to refigure them to the meshes I am trying to animate. Move the bones around and, even with the most fastidious efforts of mine, the IK & FK starts to go haywire.

Request/Proposal:
I am willing to pay a reasonable sum of money to be taken through the process required for rigs made in the “Vegdahl style” compatible with my game meshes. By reasonable, I am talking hundreds of dollars. If Nathan himself takes it up (provided I can also somehow bring in my US animator to also view said tutorial), I might be persuaded to upgrade that to $1K.

As I hope is obvious from the sum of money I am offering - I am not interested in a five minute run through the basics. I want something that will take myself (relatively experienced in Blender) and another animator (very experienced in Maya, getting there with Blender) through the process in enough detail that we can apply it to the twenty or so characters we’ve been putting together.

Is this a possibility?

A thought that just occurred to me - I have no hassles whatsoever with others getting the tutorial either. So if someone were willing to use me as a guinea pig for something they are going to polish and sell to others - I’m more than cool with that. So long as I get the information/demonstration I need.

Why not get Nathan Vegdahl himself? I know he’s currently doing freelance work, and would be open to offers (especially paid ones, heehee!)

You can contact him regarding contract work at [email protected]

He’s been dropping some knowledge on us at recent Seabugs. Worth every penny!

Thanks for the tip/info ogbog, I have done so and am waiting on a reply.

It’s a pity the Australian Blender crew is so spread out. An Aussie equivalent to your SeaBugs would be cool…

Yeah, I always wondered when one for Australia would show up, what with the fairly large population of users there.

There are a few users of note (& quite a few unnotables such as myself) here in Australian, but they seem to be spread out pretty thinly. We’ve got guys spread out all along the east coast here, but no concentrations big enough (from my contacts) to really set up the equivalent.

On the upside, I’m in contact with Nathan now, so this post has served a purpose :slight_smile:

Well, I e-mailed Nathan and haven’t heard back. Is he on vacation?