Ok. So, I’ve been working on a little project involving the Leviathan from Atlantis The Lost Empire. I have all the things modeled and textured. However, there is a small bump on the road. And that is rigging the beast.
I already figured out about rigging the segments. But, there are a few things I’m stuck on. Like, arm movements with all those muscle wires and armor. I may know about the IKs and all. But this is something I might need some advice on. And that’s not the only thing that I might need advice on. It’s how to animate the tail fins and making the big tail flop. What I’m aiming for is the accuracy from the movie.
The best way to get help around here is to post up the .blend file. As you know, since you haven’t posted much around here, attaching files to your post might not be possible. So use a file hosting site and paste the link here. I understand you have put time into this and you may not be willing to share your work, you only need to post the parts that are needed. For example, post a file with only one shoulder/arm/claw, so users can see what you have going on.
I can see this is a mechanical sort of rigging for the arms, like the claws/arms of a lobster. If I were rigging this, I would get an FK arm chain working on the blue and green lines in your sketch. Once that is working, add in the secondary bits, the red line in your sketch, and progress from there…
Thanks for posting the files, now I see what you are working with.
So tell me about the range of motion of the arm. To me, it looks like the arm sections can only rotate on one axis, the world’s Z-axis, is that right? Or do you expect it to be able to raise/lower the arm above/below the head?
I think, overall, the placement of your bones look good. except for the pincer bones.
And looking at this, this will require a bit of work…
Well, I did try to match up the bone’s heads to the points of the pincer claws. As for the range of motion, it should raise up and down if you saw from my sketch and the movie.
Here is a clip to get a better understanding of what I’m talking about.
So the pincer claw bones, they run from the rotation point of the claw to the tip of the claw? In this screenshot, the selected bone would control the inner claw?
And the longer bone would control the bigger, outer claw?
The tubes/wires/hoses are going to be a bit of a problem area. I see how you created them and they are going to be a challenge to work with. The hoses, as I see it, need to bend. Other parts, like the pincer claws, are hard surface objects. Hard surface objects is a mechanical rigging job, easy to do. The hoses are a soft surface (that’s not the right term…), it’s a mesh that you want to deform, change the shape of. The hoses mesh isn’t really good for animation. First, it will be resource heavy, and second, it will be hard to get it to deform easily.
I worked on weight painting part of the hoses. With the selected bone rotated, not all of the mesh is following along, see the spikes by the shoulder bone? Those are verts that aren’t playing nice and need extra work to get correct. IMO, you would be better off if you re-modeled those…
If you modeled a profile of the hoses, and extruded and rotated this profile as needed, you would probably end up using 1/10 the amount of verts. The more verts you have, when trying to animate, the slower the UI becomes because it has to do more work, moving more verts.
See attached file…
Randy
P.S. Ouch, your file is over 5Mb, so I can’t attach it. Try this:
Hi, i would divide the bones in the sections where there are hard surfaces connected to soft objects and also use bendy bones to connect the cables. The claws division was just for easy parenting and will have to be opened first.
Like this:
