I am working on the Humane Rigging Tut from Nathan, and trying to apply the concepts I have learned to a custom model I made. I can’t figure out how to stop the mesh from separating. Could someone provide some help? The mesh is normal and works fine when I don’t pull the body or feet beyond what they normally would. I am looking for a way to lock the mesh so I don’t have to worry about over extending the rig.
Does this make sense?
I believe that problem is covered in Humane Rigging. Take another look at Chapter 2.
I am going over chapter 5 because I grabbed the heel role from Chapter 5. I checked all of chapter 2 and didn’t see anything. I will keep you posted. Thanks for your help so far.
Do you have a deform rig? That’s where you’d fix this problem. A deform rig is just a series of bones whose only purpose is to deform the mesh, and they copy to loc/rot/scale of other various bones in the rig.
From what I see of your example, you have an IK leg rig there and your foot ik controller looks to also be deforming the foot. That’s why it can be pulled away from the leg, because IK controllers can’t be a child of the bones they are controlling. Now if you had a set of deform bones, you’d have an upper leg, lower leg, foot, and toe bones. The toe bone would be a connected child of the foot bone, foot bone a connected child of lower leg bone, lower leg bone would… etc, etc… The upper leg bone would copy the loc/rot of the IK upper leg bone, all the rest of the deform bones would just copy the rot of their IK bones. Since all the deform bones are connected children, they can only copy the rot of the IK bones and can’t be torn apart like yours.
If you were creating an FK leg rig, it would be constructed just as the deform leg rig would be, and you could use that instead of the deform rig. That’s how I use to rig and I used to think the deform bones were a waste of time creating. Lost of bones to copy, rename, ad constraints & drivers, tons of work. Now that my rigs are fairly advanced, I see the sense in them, keeps complex rigs just a tad bit more sane to deal with.
So copy your upper leg, lower leg, foot & toe bones, move them to a different bone layer. Make them connected children, and make the new upper leg the child of whatever the IK upper leg’s parent is, and add copy rot constraints to the new bone’s targeting the IK bones. Rename the new bones and update the mesh’s vertex groups. Solves your problem.
Along the way to learning this stuff, you’ll learn how to control multiple constraints with one control. When you learn that, you’ll already have an FK leg in your character, you simply have to turn all the constraints off.
Good luck learning…
Randy
You can’t just skip around Humane rigging and pick pieces you like. The whole point of the series is to go through the entire thing from start to finish. Later chapters use pieces of rigs from earlier chapters and it’s expected that you already know how to use that piece so it is not explained again. The heel problem you’re having is because you haven’t created the secondary deform rig that was presented in an earlier chapter. Go back to the beginning and do the whole series properly.
I will rewatch it. Honestly I have watched the hole thing, over a 6 month period. I must have forgotten some things. I will check it out again.
I believe you. But Nathan packed so much into that series… I know it’s in there somewhere. I remember seeing a clip where he pulls the foot away from the leg, just like your original image, but I didn’t re-watch the whole thing to find where it was.
