Okay, I’m making a little dude for animating as an enemy in my game. But I’m running into a couple of minor snags.
Firstly, the elbow. When I bend it, the vertices in the inside of the angle poke out too far and kind of mess up the smoothness as they bunch together. I’ve tried simply removing all the verticies in the inside of the joint and that improved things; is that the usually done way of handling that?
The second way has me more stumped, and concerns the shoulder. I’m trying to figure out how to allow an arm to “twist”. Like, you can hang your arm down and turn your hand about 270 degrees. When I do that, I get some pretty visible twisting effects in the arm. It gets narrower and looks stretched … I’m sure you know what I mean. Any ideas how to cope with that? Any good sites on animating human-like models in general? Because the shoulder is just nasty to rig. Still not sure how I’ll handle animating facial expressions …
Not quite sure how to fix any of your problems, really (I’m still too new to blender), but I would suggest using mesh deformations for the facial expressions of your character. I haven’t done that yet, but I think that would be the easiest way.
I thought of that. I also thought maybe making a face full of armatures for more easily manipulating them. Just curious what the conventions are for this sort of thing …
I would suggest using weight painting to assign armatures instead of just selecting them and using the assign function in the mesh buttons. That should result in smoother transitions between vertice groups.
Ah, yes. I had these same problems and nearly gave up on rigging forever ;). Its tough and like UV mapping (which i STILL cant figure out…) the procedure can change from project to project. I have found the following things to help:
Model every join half flexed. This takes care of half of the deformation for you.
Any ideas how to cope with that? Any good sites on animating human-like models in general? Because the shoulder is just nasty to rig. Still not sure how I’ll handle animating facial expressions …