I have been playing with the principles you have described here, Yes I know the model is poor, that’s not what I have been trying to do however. I have at least kept the feet and hands still and were I want them!
Here’s my FIRST skeleton animation, I should be grateful for any advise as to how to improve the animation or armature, I know how to improve the model, it is supposed to be mechanical in nature:
Finally - FK presumably means moving thigh, shins, forearms, etc. by rotation and placement, whereas IK is moving a control bone to move the rest of a limb, is this correct? If so is there anyway to switch other than using Rigify, I have not tried this yet. Some pointers would be handy.:rolleyes:
Well, having spent several hours learning Blender, I’m disappointed to see that Pixar’s stuff is still much better than mine. There ought to be some kind of warning about the need to “learn stuff” on the software. Who do I sue?
If you want to learn the basics of making a FK/IK switch, I recommend watching the Humane Rigging tutorial series. It can be found on YouTube or you can purchase it through the Blender Foundation if you’d like to give some financial support to development in exchange for education. The setup process is rather complex to describe in a forum post.
As for your rig there’s one improvement that could be made, a step that I skipped when I made my corrections. Lock the location of the Body bone. In the property panel where you see the location, rotation and scale values for each bone, you can lock axes off with the padlock icons. Lock off all three location values there. This will prevent you from being able to grab the body bone and separate it from the backward-facing hip bone. You’ll only be able to rotate, which is the only thing you really want unless you plan on splitting your character in half at the waist at some point. The animation itself is a fine test animation. It’s pretty slow and smooth to be realistic motion. I don’t know what you have in mind exactly so it’s hard to be much more specific than that.
Mr. H, Thanks for that - just wanted to be sure I was on the right track. I shall scale the keyframes in the graph editor (select all points, timeline positioned on frame 1 and scale X axis by 0.5 for example) to speed it all up once I am happy with the movements. I shall buy the relevant tutorial, I have already bought others as this is my way to support Blender in general.
Well after several more hours (working very hard, too) my creation “The Incredibles 2” is still noticably inferior to the original. I think this software must be broken. Can I have my no money back?
