Well, I dunno if anyone did notice me asking what I was supposed to do when my number of bones made the menu bigger than the screen, but anyway, on a related note, I figure I might as well stick this up. It’s been going a few days now, and I’m starting to see progress in the deformation department. Hey, so, fear the overkill. :eyebrowlift2:
haha nice man, whats it like when moving the muscles and are there any movies youve got of the mesh deformation.
looking forward to see more of this 
one of the coolest looking rigs i have seen in a while, i hope you are going to put most of the bones on their own layers,(for example the geo bones on one and the mucles on another).
Oh my gosh, That is really a Mass project :eek: One can barely see mesh behind all the bones 
Instant bookmark.
Looking forward to the progress, as I am thinking of starting rigging myself, after my model is done… :rolleyes:
One question, How the hell do you hold control of so many bones … I imagine it would be so hard to build such a rigg and more frustrating to control it … I am fascinated :eek:
Oh! Mi! Gawd! That’s a lot of bones!
I did something similar with a face animation rig and discovered that about half the facial muscles didn’t need to be animated separately because they duplicated the effects of similar nearby muscles. So I’d expect Renamon Rig version 2 to have fewer bones.
On the deformation issue, the big problem is maintaining the volume of the mesh when it bends. Your rib cage structure is a good model for this, most of the volume is inside the cage and most of the volume outside the cage (except breasts) follow the shape of the cage fairly closely. To maintain volume around the hips, though, you’re probably going to need to put the pelvis in a similar cage, as well as caging the muscle masses of the thighs and calves. I don’t envy you that task, but am looking forward to seeing some more animations of Renamon doing her moves.
BTW, does putting the bones on separate layers help with the menu problem?
:eek: (no comment)
so ur telling me that those muscles can deform in realtime
omgosh!!! a@.@p
Why don’t you use shape keys?
Setting up such an amount of bones must be awful!
Daniel: Heh, thanks, no movies yet though, I’m working on ironing out the kinks before throwing animation out.
Rexprime: Yup, I’ve seperated them into layers already, I have a control layer, a muscle layer, a skeletal layer, I’m going to have a face layer, and then I have one layer at the back for the system-based stuff, like targets and grabbers and weird bones that sit around for constraints but don’t really do anything.
Freak: It is a lot of bones. Also, don’t knock yourself out trying to rig it like this if you’re just starting. 
I’m just doing this cause I have way too much time.
Orinoco: Yeah, I wanted a good system for the chest/lungs, cause that’s such a center for the body. There’s a system in there to make the lungs inflate and deflate properly. It still needs a bit of work, though.
You’re right about the hips. I’m breaking it up into left and right illiums, with iliac crests splitting off. It doesn’t make any difference to the deformation, but it’s a crap load easier to sort bones when they aren’t all connected to a generic ‘pelvis’ bone. The thighs are giving me trouble, but then, so did the shoulders. Omni joints are a beggar.
MagicMyshu: Yup, they pretty much can. :]
Neablo: Well, I thought about it for a while, and shape keys are great for weird wrinkles and details and stuff, but the thing is, they’re intensely local, and intensely static. They are unadaptive, in a word. If you do the wrong thing, you can break the mesh. With a proper skeletal/muscle system, you can do so much more. You can link muscles to other muscles and make them cover so much more. The rib-cage is connected to the sternum, which is connected to the collarbones, the collarbones are the basis for the neck muscles, and also are guided by the shoulder blades, which are attached to the trapezius, etc. And if you set up a working physical system, you’ll never have to worry about it breaking.
Yeah sure,
working with shape keys is often a pain but the results can be very good looking.
I can’t decide whether you are a genius or a freak :eyebrowlift2:
but I am VERY curious how your bone solution will work.
Cool development, I am very much interested to see how it will turn out. Bone weighting will be SCARY.
As in NIGHTMARE :evilgrin: But still very interesting.
What constraints and such are you using in the shoulder and rib cage area? I started a mass bone rig like that, but I think it was too much for my skill level.
i hope this all works out, and if posable a tutorial that would kick butt, like to see were this goes.
Well, I’m actually holding up for a bit due to a terminal segfault in the CVS build I was using. It’s been patched since, but I’m still waiting on graphicall.org to produce another one. Since there’s nothing else going on right now, I’ll see if I can explain a bit. Don’t expect a lot, though, I suck at this stuff.
Hey, freak: The complicated part is setting the bones up to be controlled, controlling them once I’m done isn’t a problem. This link >here< is the end control rig that the user sees, so far it’s proven to be very nearly unbreakable, assuming the animator has some common sense. The main ones are labeled. Actually, there are two more inside the feet that aren’t visible cause I haven’t made them control shapes, and they control the heel-to-toe roll. The different colours of text mean nothing except that half-way through I discovered red showed up better.
bobmiq: I dunno, that might take a while to explain, I’ll see if I can’t figure something out.
Neablo: Probably a freak.
Mathew_von: Heh, I’m flattered you think it’s good enough to warrant a tutorial.
Anyway, I might have something lung related up at some point, and I’ll be able to start work again as soon as the new build is released from graphicall.
Yikes, that is some crazy stuff.
Nice rig but way too many bones definitely. As Orinoco said many bones are related to each other. Good weight painting and some helper-bones at the right places cut down a lot on bone number. Too much is not always better 
bobmiq: In the end I had trouble finding a short yet satisfactorily clear way of explaining what my lung set-up was. So here’s the stripped down .blend. The only bones you should touch are the ones with attached shapes, the rest I just never got around to locking down. The lung control bone here is the little crossed set of rings. Scaling inflates and deflates, moving it just helps exaggerate the animation a little more. At one point expanding and deflating the lungs provided shoulder animation to some extent, but it got in the way too much, so I just decided to add the animation manually for more control.
Odjin: So far I thought I’d planned everything pretty carefully. 
Tell me which of the bones you think is unnecessary.
In general all bones which are “stiff”. This means all bones that are attached to some parent bone and never have a motion on themselves are not necessary. So for example the bones along the rib cage. There are for example 5 bones in each rib. A rib by itself can not “bend” ( or else it breaks ) so the bones move relative to their parent bones. Hence there is no “additional information” carried by those bones. It is the same if you move the top most rib bone than it is if all bones in the rib are moved. Hence they can be stripped and replaced by correct weight painting.
This is different if you plan on breaking his ( rena is dubbed as ‘he’ around here ) ribs but I don’t think this is the plan. So all bones not producing more diversity can be replaced with weight painting. I hope this is understandable from my end.
@ Odjin : But your ribs are flexible . They rotate from the spine when breathing . And also with some people, especially females, the ribs can even register the side to side motion of the spine . I’ve personally known a few girls who were very limber like that :eyebrowlift: …
It all just depends on how complex BlackBoe wants to make it .
@ BlackBoe : Pretty interesting set up you have . Have you tried some poses yet ? It would be interesting to see how your armature deformed the mesh .
Did you build the entire thing in envelope view ? If you did you might want to check the bone roll - I just had to reset to zero almost all the bones in my rig today . I made all mine in stick view and didn’t notice . Bones with odd roll values can screw up when constraints are applied . Especially the stretch to constraint . If you do it’s not a big mess . If you built it using X-axis mirror you just have to change one of them and the corresponding bone will reset right along .
Looking forward to your updates .
