GE IK armatures and rigging

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

Hi I’m just working through some rigging for the GE and am wanting to know what kind of advice people can give me regarding the complexity of rigs.

I really would like a rig with the freedom constraints and IK offer - but in the GE is this just going to be a bad idea? - Are there any examples of advanced GE rigging?

—little idea—

If I have a control rig and then a simple game rig which has joints with ‘baked’ keys. So I could use IK and then maybe a script or something to key the joints rot/loc at the correct frames.
simple rig

2

Just a little bump - any ideas or comments on how I was working with the above rig?

if anyone has any examples I’d be happy to see how they are put together. -

3

Keep your armatures as simple as posible, else thing will start getting sloooooow. Personal recomendation, keep the imortant chracters with good rigging, the rest go minimalist.

4

bump.

any tutorial’s on rigging in the GE?

heck, any good tutorials on rigging in general?
the only ones ive been able to find are ones that get about as complicated as bending a rectangle.
im yet to find a decent character rigging tutorial…

5

I’m not too experienced, but I’ve done a bit of animation for BGE and I agree with Cloud. Simple is best.

I think I read somewhere that GTA4 (yeah, the really big game) used shape keys for the finger movement. This saves you 30 bones in your armature (3 for each finger and thumb), roughly halving the number of bones that you’d use.

IK is usable in the game engine, however, I found from bitter experience that action blending in BGE only works for FK actions. If you use IK then you have to blend actions individually through scripting and intermediate actions and such. I found it a real PITA and it was beyond me to do in a reasonable time frame. I’m not sure if this will change with the changes to Blender’s animation system (or indeed, if it’s already changed since my struggles).

I’ve considered writing a script to automate the process of converting actions created using IK into FK actions, but due to me having only a small amount of coding experience it would be a large undertaking and has been relegated to my extensive todo list. If you want to attempt this, I would be glad to share the ideas I’ve had up to now if you’d like.

I found the BSoD animation section quite helpful for learning rigging. It has sections on hands, arms, legs and feet etc.

There are several rigging examples about if you look. Blenrig 3 alpha 2 has recently been released, but is most likely too complex for BGE usage (though is an excellent and lifelike rig, and well worth looking at).

For rigging a 4-legged animal I found some good examples for Maya and 3DSMax that were fairly easy to implement in Blender.