lock things up??????

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

:frowning:
What does this mean?

Locking Things Up

Final steps: Lock the appropriate axes of the bones, and organize your layers

Found here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Rigging/Arm_Rigs

Well, two links away. I back tracked back to the arm rig, the hand rig was never done, to see if I had missed something… but the arm rigging was never finished either.

Im not really sure how helpful this these pages are, since too many options are left unexplained.

In option one, what do you do with the armUV ?

Could someone please update, finish this part of the wiki?

What about the picture of the bones inside of bones? Whats that?

Thanks

PS Here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Rigging/Leg_Rigs#Let.27s_Build_It

I followed the tut per word for the chicken leg, and nothing moves as pictured. Nada, nothing. every bone just pulls away until you pull the upper leg, then the foot and lower follow it.

PLease can someone fix this wiki? or ME?

Sorry to nag, but further down the legs rigging page that everyone tells you to read, it shows a couple pictures. It tells you to make one set:
The concept behind this rig is that we can use a simple leg rig that is easy to control and animate, to control a second set of leg bones which does the mesh deforming

But neglects the details? And the hierarchy really doesnt make much sense to me. I guess if you could write the tut, you can understand it. I think it is a waste of space!

So you make two bones called upper leg rig and lower leg rig. Then you are shown some hiearchy which is pointless. Because I dont have a legUV or even something called a leg!

Reading further…Im now supposed to add some contraints to things that dont exist.

IK constrain leg to legIK and set

We dont have a leg, or a legIK bone?

Following on:

Now add a new bone about 0.4 units above the leg root point

You have to start assuming, I guess? Since there is no leg bone, this much mean the root of the whole leg? I dont know.

But until this is fixed? Please dont tell people to go there, Thank you again.

Sorry for my out here, but MG!

#2

Well the original author I guess never got around to finishing it … And yes it is a bit frustrating but most of the examples (the unfinished ones) are for more advanced rigging techniques … which might or might not suit your needs … I have personally found it more educational just to build and try out armature setups then to follow step by step tutorials .

Rigging is just basic problem solving . You just need to familiarize your self with the concepts the armature system is based on (hierarchy most importantly, and of you are more math inclined vectors and quaternions) and the available tools you have for controlling it (these would be all the nice constraints the developers have added) . Once you have a good grip of these you can rig just about anything .

As for “lock things up” … All that means is to hit N to bring up the Transform Properties subwindow in Pose Mode and to hit the little padlock icon next to the transform,scale and rotation XYZ values which will prevent the bone from moving/scaling/rotating on the axis that the lock is on . For example, if you lock the X and Y transform(move) values you will only be able to move that object along the Z axis .

This is true for direct manipulation of the bone/object but not so when constraints are involved … Though now there is the limit to constraint which I think solves that issue … Though I don’t think that works with the IK constraint which has a separate lock/limit panel in the Armature Bones panel when IK is active …

… Hope that last part didn’t confuse you …

#3

Thanks, I understand about learning and doing yourself, Ive been doing that for years, however, you have to start someplace, and the wiki is the start.

And someone, should finish/fix those pages. Can you do it? I would be happy too, if I understood it.

I have gone through some easy bone tuts, but they dont explain constraints or questions like, why do you have to have an extra bone to track to, instead of just using the last bone for the track to?

Of why do we use bones with the deform button off because they will be null bones, or ik solvers? Why not just draw a line with the ik solver tool and create the constraint that way?

You know a separate graphic for something other than a bone, but used in the the armature system?

I dont know it all seems archaic to me. Sorry, I am pretty frustrated with blender wiki right now. A person could learn blender so much easier if they had a manual, that was finished.

I actually wanted to learn the advanced features of armatures, bones and rigging. I dont really need them for this character, however I now have some time to invest in learning.

But everything I find, is do this and that, not really explaining why doing this is really good because it allows this joint to rotate, blahblahblah.

I would like the best way to move the character with the least movements. If I use the auto frame insert, It would be nice not to struggle getting the thing into the pose and into another one.

So I am thinking of the whole thing like the marionette puppets I had as a kid.

Anyway, thanks very very much for you help.

#4

Well yes the Wiki is … sort of the place to start but much like this forum the Wiki isn’t exactly animation friendly … very good on how to make stills and visualizations but not so much IMHO on the animation side of things … but when I started using Blender at version 2.42a Ton had just revamped the animation side of things and ED had just come out … so just from a historical point of view this stuff is sort of the “wild wild west” for Blender … and from what I have noticed trying to help people on this part of the forum, especially, a lot of people have trouble converting to animating from making stills … a lot of magical thinking on their part … and no, the armature is not like a marionette puppet at all …

But the animation side of things have been changing so much just in the past year (several new constraints) and the amazing new stuff that the Peach project is bringing down the pipeline … it is kind of hard to keep up the Wiki manual up to date …
A lot of the more complex rigs that were built with all the confusing extra bones will not be necessary with the new tools that will be available in the next release . All those extra bones were mostly to get the mesh to deform “properly” one way or another and with things like the new mesh defrom modifier and bone heat skinning a lot of that will become happily unnecessary … So updating the stuff on the Wiki is somewhat pointless …

And another problem with the Wiki is that I don’t think you can upload blends there for examples . And learning how to rig is best done by examining the rigs that are available out there like Mancandy etc.

Here is a variation on the finger rig that Mancandy uses : http://uploader.polorix.net//files/307/MANCANDY_FINGER_VARIATION.blend … it just has the bones and doesn’t even have a mesh attached to it so you can see what all the constraints are for and how it works a lot easier … My “variation” is that I applied the Stretch to constraint to the bone that you rotate and scale to animate and added a target so that all you have to do is to only move the target to animate instead of rotating and scaling … saves a few keystrokes and maintains my preferance to just grab and only set Loc keys in my animations …

A good collection tutorials and other stuff seems to be on Calvin’s site : http://calvin.sdlfk.org/ … This might be a better place for you to learn from … It also has a link to Sketchy’s Ludwig which unlike Mancandy uses the Action Constraint to animate the fingers rather then the scale/rotate bone with IK solution in Mancandy …

And I just went to the manual and the entry for the Action Constraint isn’t done … and to my knowledge this is the best description of the constraint and how to set it up : http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=48327&highlight=action+constraint … right here on the forum …

There are a lot more places to go to to get information then just the Wiki . Not everyone has the time or the dedication to maintain the Wiki (thanks to those who do) and so it seems there will always be gaps in the Wiki manual since things are constantly changing … Best to seek out information where it is then to expect it all to be neatly in a single place … of course you can always ask here if you can’t figure it out or find it with a search …

#5

The BSOD area of the wiki was a summertime effort by about 6 or so people to focus on writing something in the way of tutorial/book documentation for Blender, hence the acronym. Those people may have moved on and those pages are thus orphaned, unless someone picks them up.

Just like with Max and other commercial packages, some areas of Blender are getting so intense that you have to start paying for CDs and books. In the area of character rigging, Tony’s book (see Amazon, Character Anim with Blender) is what you really need. I bought it, compared it to the wiki, and determined that the whole character animation of the wiki would have to be rewritten, essentially replicating the book, in order to really be adequate. And no one wants to rewrite a perfectly good book.

#6

Rigging is just basic problem solving . You just need to familiarize your self with the concepts the armature system is based on (hierarchy most importantly, and of you are more math inclined vectors and quaternions) and the available tools you have for controlling it (these would be all the nice constraints the developers have added) . Once you have a good grip of these you can rig just about anything .

This is what I was trying to do. Looking at Mancandy and ludwik, dont help if you dont have a grasp on the things above.

When my plumbing burst, i didnt take it apart to discover how it was melded together, or how to learn melding. I read a book and learned that way.

Starting from the ground up. Now I can plumb and meld pipes together nicely.

Vertex Pusher: if you understand the problem, why dont you fix it?

When I find something like this in the wiki, I fix it if I can. In this case, I cannot, since I dont understand it.

Yes, I know The BSOD was well intentioned. But that tut was like that back in January when I first started using blender.

Buy the book? yes, I will, however I still need the answer to what this guy was trying to explain. Lets look at it from another point of view:

You have been walking through the desert for 1 day without water, you get to a gastation to discover the water machine, is empty. So you go to the sink, and discover the guys water pump is broken.

Now you have to wait another 300 miles to get water at the next station. Do you live? or die?

In the new release, it was my understanding only errors were to be corrected? Now there will be a new bone section?
Great.

#7

Vertex Pusher: if you understand the problem, why dont you fix it?
…

Well just because I understand the problem doesn’t mean I have any rights to alter someone else’s work even if it is left unfinished … I could probably figure out what the leg rig example was supposed to be like but I wouldn’t presume to “finish” it for him … I’m sure he has his reasons for not completing his original outline (he has added a few more things BTW in the last year) … But the part that he did finish I did find quite helpful being a total noob to CG (or for that matter traditional) animation .

Besides almost nobody solves any particular problem the same way … there are enough tools in Blender already that you can solve any problem in at least two or more ways with each approach having valid points like one is easier to set up the other is more accurate etc .

Let me give you a more concrete and personal story of what helped me a lot in the past year : I read a few books on CG programming (one of the things that made me interested in Blender was the fact that you could see the source code) which made me understand the basic underlying principles in CG in general . Now none of these books were Blender specific, in fact all used DirectX instead of OpenGL for their coding, but the basic reasons why something (say the hierarchy used in the armature) would behave in a certain way was made clearer to me and so helped me understand it well enough to rig and solve problems when they came up .