Hi all its my first time posting in the forum an i need some help.
Can you guys tell me what the name of the menu and how it is done.
That menu is sometimes called a ‘switch board’, but I’ve never really heard a proper name for that style menu.
As to how it’s created, it’s most likely armature bones with custom shapes, that drive shape keys. I would think the 4 black corners (and maybe the nose) is one armature bone, that can’t be selected. It’s just there for the shape you see on the screen and is probably the parent of all other control bones you see.
To see this, select a bone in the armature, locate the armature properties panel, and under display, un-tick the shapes box. You should now see bones instead of the pretty shapes for this menu.
Before the 2.5/6 series of blender, back in the 2.4x days, all rigs had this type of set up to control fk/ik switches. Back then, if you wanted to switch an arm from fk to ik, you’d do it via a switchboard menu like this. The current version of blender allows riggers to use python to embed these controls in the UI. Python won’t allow for graphical images in the UI, so you can’t draw shapes like that in the UI. That’s probably why it was created, much easier to understand what controls do what, rather than text sliders like the fk/ik switches.
Randy
Here is a file I made while doing some driver practice it may be of help, if not go to http://www.blendswap.com/ and download some rigs go to the armature panel and turn on and off shapes and you will see the that the bones are being told to use a mesh as the display item, make a single bone and mesh shape and have a go at replicating it getting your mesh shape to line up with the bone can be confusing, CG cookie have some good tutorials check out face rigs.
Attachments
BoneDriverPractice.blend (92.1 KB)