See how the foot bone faces the leg.L bone? But if you extrude it as I did first, then it faces the other direction. And when you parent the IKleg.L to it, then the IKleg.L moves down to it…
So I tried adding the bone and pointing it at the leg.l, but when you parent it to the leg.l the leg.l move to the other end of the bone, in the foot.
Sorry, if I cant explain correctly. Really love some here.:o
Then you are supposed to be able to rotate it like this:
But it doesnt do that, it rotates round and round?
Reading the text on Calvin’s pictures it looks like you may not have the parenting set up properly. I’ve built this rig a couple times, and that is key, along with the constraints. You must make sure the the thigh is ik to the knee helper, the shin is IK to the IKleg.L bone, and the parent of the IKleg.L bone is the Foot.L bone.
In mine, the foot.L bone is parented to backtoe.L which isn’t pictured in these screenshots, but is added later, for this step, it shouldn’t have a parent(the foot.L bone). Normally the spinning round and round is because of cyclic dependencies, like having the foot.L bone with a parent that is beneath it in the chain, like the IKleg.l, or the shin.L bone.
Hope that helps, if you have a blend, maybe can offer more assistance.
**EDIT here is a pic too, of course the thigh bone will have a parent, and the foot bone will too, eventually.
Just in case anybody else has issues with the rig and comes across this thread, you also have to select “use tip” for the IK bones in the shin and thigh. That was one of the major improvements as we’ve come to the newer versions of blender, you may see some older tutorials that have you create a null bone when using IK solvers, with “use tip” you don’t have to do that.
Also as a further note for IK solvers, they point to the base of a bone, not its tip. That’s why if you try to make IK fingers with a stretchy bone to help them curve, you need an extra bone for the IK solver to point to, it can only point to the base of a bone.
**Edit–I just wanted to point out that I’m not trying to hijack the thread or call anyone out, I just saw some improvements that could be made in other parts of ititrx’s rig. The rig looks good so far, almost done from what I saw.
LOL, thanks very much… no problems, hijack if it helps to understand bones!
Just one question. Could you make the pictures again, but use black for the text? I cant read it…well I can but its really difficult for me.
I dont want much right?
That armature has been done about 6 times I think, but never working how I wanted it to work. Stupid thing.
I wanted just one that worked, keeping the knees ahead instead of flipping around to the in or out side, little things like that.
Then I was going to dup it a few times to create the actions for each separate thing, climbing stairs, walking a plank, jumping rocks. You know things like that.
I thought it would be easy to make the bones, and it is, but them making them react the way I want them to react… whooooosh right over me iti head!
Like the null bone stuff, I dont get it, but maybe I will tomorrow?
Again, thanks very much, I do appreciate it.
PS, please feel free to add more info about the newer methods here. It will help me and others.
OH, so the stretchy bone is a piece fo elastic between the two ends, and you can loosen or tighten it with the other thingy?
So would that work, putting a strtchy bone from the torso to the heels and shrinking it to create a sit, or even just when you bend one knee the body comes down to follow the bend?
Do you understand? LOL… or am I giving you a headache?
I’ll do you one better, here is a quick tutorial from Calvin on the stretchy finger bones. I wouldn’t use it for anything more complicated like a sit, or the legs, they need a little more independent movement, and it can be achieved easier by moving a torso bone into sitting while using IK legs.
The stretchy bone is the only bone that needs to be visible or manipulated, the finger1, finger2, finger3 and the IK helper can all be hidden so that the animator doesn’t get confused.
I think if you pick apart some other rigs, it will help out a lot, one of the things to remember, is when you are looking at other people’s rigs, they generally hide the bones they don’t want you to manipulate. So if you simply select the other layers in the Armature Display options in its editing menu[F9], then you can see all the bone layers, and how they interact. The rigs that have helped me the most are the Intro to character animation from BSOD and the book by Tony Mullen, Calvin’s simple page, Blenrig, Mancandy and Ludwig. Daniel Martinez Lara has some interesting work too, I would also check out his Rednelb character. Here are the characters from the animation challenges which all perform very well, some are duplicates of the ones I mentioned, but there are others too. There are also some other odd combinations being used in the characters I created here(warning, lots of pics). Roubal wrote some stuff about inverted hierarchy kinematics, you can find links about all kinds of rigs in this post, it’s part of another thread, but no images in this one post. Here’s that full thread, from a WIP I’ve been neglecting.
Also, now that meshdeform(mdef) is a modifier in SVN, rigging will change even more. There are a ton of links on that as well, but you can check out the chinchilla from peach, also malefico has started to do somefacial riggingusing it. A quick search on “mesh deform modifier” also leads to some more information, but you’d have to download an SVN build from graphicall or build it yourself to take advantage. SVN is a little unstable though.
and no headache, it helps to understand better by talking it out, err…writing it out.
**edit-- in the attached image, I tried to describe the null bone stuff with IK solver constraints.
I followed the BSOD last year, and still the one arm going backwards in the walk cycle was never fixed…
In the Advanced one, the tut was never finished. It has hands and feet. In fact the arm is from that tut.
Never could figure out what he was saying in the feet part. He mentions bones he hasnt used, nor outlined.
I have a couple posts , back there v regarding that, but it was never addressed. I still dont understand what that one says.
I would like to understand so I can fix it in the wiki. I would be happy to that, lol.
I have the mancandy rig, and some others. Its funny because I had a post regarding how the knees move without bones…you mention the answer above. Smile.
