Hi everyone, I am new to Blender.
I went through the doughnut phase and I did the entire thing (blender guru tutorial) so I know the basics.
My main intention using Blender is for animation. Since I have absolutely no idea where and how to get/create/extract models, I used the XNAlara models. I found a tool that easily puts the XNA models to Blender.
The only problem is, and I don’t know if it is related to using XNA models, that the models are hard to model. The entire body is covered in straw-like bones. I pick one bone with the intention of posing the leg or arm but I get the clothes instead. It is messy and absolutely hard to work with.
Any tips, anything I’m doing wrong, is there someplace else I should be getting models?
Thanks in advance, any help would be so greatly appreciated.
This is more like the next step in your jeorney than an actual solve to your current problem, but I would seek out a tutorial on the Rigify rig… You see, in a rig like this, there are a lot more bones than you actually want to use when your animating. You get the handle bones you actually move around, bones that actually deform the rig, tiny tweek bones, bones that should be controlled by physics for flapping coats, etc… all controlled with a web of contraints and for the most part hidden from the animator till they have to go poking around inside for some reason. It looks like these XNA models have something similar… but when imported into blender, you see ALL the bones… not just the one’s you meant to see from the get-go. and the constrants - these mean you control one bone and all the relivent one’s follow - not sure that they’re working either.
Hi! Thank you so much for your reply.
It’s one heck of a journey I guess I can manually hide the bones I won’t be using (can this be done faster or do I have to click on each bone? cause then I don’t know how to get them back).
I thought about re-rigging the character from scratch. There are many tutorials on youtube but this is quite a complex model. I think I started way to hard on myself.
Oh I’ll see what I can do! I truly appreciate your reply!
OK - so I don’t know about XNA rigs, but the bones should be in layers - look in the armature properties panal… and you should be able to turn whole layers of bones off and on…
However,
I don’t know the addon that imports these models… I don’t know if they’re in layers…
And constraints … at the most obvious, an IK constraint means that you cna posision the hand ant the elbow will follow, but there will be contraints here for fabric following the arm and so on… I doupt they will all import into Blender fully working, so you’ll have to go through and fix them…
Hmm I’ll try that… if i find it too complicated I’ll just use a simpler model I guess.
At the moment I know absolutely nothing with working with different types of models. I guess the XNA were the most accessible so I went with those.
You can also find free models on mixamo and rig any character there.
Mixamo uses simple rigs which can be used for motion captures or can be edit into a more complex rig.
They also have animations made with motion capture.
Also, if you want to do many proffesional animations later and you would spend money for that I would only learn the basics of rigging bodys and faces as a beginner (not too complex rigs), and use motion capture later. motion capture is way faster to learn, simple and good for proffesional film production, games etc.
I guess I can manually hide the bones I won’t be using (can this be done faster or do I have to click on each bone? cause then I don’t know how to get them back).