Okay, I have been using the Blender BGE for a couple of years and have decided that I need to know more about modelling and animation. To this end, I have made a model of a skeleton and used “rigify” to add the rig. The resulting weights were less than perfect, but this is almost certainly because of the nature of a skeletons mesh.
After some frustration I managed to get the IK poles and other stuff working and am now going through the armature bone by bone, removing and adding the required vertex groups. The reason for this post is that when I rotate the neck-bone in the Z-axis, as expected, the head rotates in tandem… However, in the X-axis the scale of the head shrinks, this is not good!
I am sure it is something to do with constraints, but I cannot find any constraints in the riggified blend. and while there is a plethora of jazzy video tutorials on rigging with rigify, there is a serious lack of good quality text based tutorials that may help me isolate the problem.
I would be grateful for any pointers on what is causing my head to shrink and if anybody knows of a good text based tutorial that may help, I would be extremely happy.
Okay, I think I have solved this, or at least found a solution that works.
As I now figure it: the head is not meant to rotate with the neck bone. The head rotates with the head bone while the neck bone rotation is used to position the head. Removing the vertex groups for the skull, jaw, teeth and eyes from the “DEF neck” group seems to give fairly natural movement to the head and neck. (smile)
I must say though, that a really well written and thought out text based tutorial covering skinning and basic posing/animation with “rigify” could really help us “Noobs” out.
Video tutorials just don’t cut it. Sure. they leave us agog with authors skill and speed, but as far as imparting knowledge and being a useful resource for problem solving? Nah, I do not think so.
go to amazon.com
search for blender 3d rigging
click on some of the results, look at the table of contents, look for a chapter on skinning, read it (a lot of the books are online) – or just buy the book