need help on several things.

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Not sure if this is the right support forum but since rigging and modelling for animating may be right, I’ll post it here.

This is the related WIP that I’m using to learn how to better rig and animate,
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=133317

If I can make the Peabrain pretty good, I may try to make the Mr.Potatamoto and animate a short based on the comic. http://www.vgcats.com/comics/ (#257: WAITING)

I have 4 issues I’m trying to figure out,

  1. How should I model Peabrain’s mouth to be as animating friendly as possible? should I model the mouth completely open and use rigging to close it? or model the mouth closed and use rigging to open it? or is the best solution in the middle (not sure but this would reduce on distortion with riggings?) ?

  2. (related to #1) Is there any guides on something that could help me figure out how to animate the mouth along the sphere surface? I’ve just did a manual posing of Peabrain and found it to be a pain to move the mouth around right. Good thing the shadeless option helps covers up the pinched look of the mouth but if I intend to animate the mouth, I will need to do it right in the first place.

3)This may potentially affect the mouth rigging and set-up so I’ll ask this now, is it possible to parent a group of vertices (a black sphere for a eye) to a single vertice on the body? would doing this make it easier to animate the eye movement? and make a set-up that would allow me to use eyelids out of the body?

  1. I’ve been looking around for guides on how to make curvy rigging (for limbs and eyebrow). Similiar to tails but I want to make extra sure that a IK chain works? or should I look into something else? also, is it possible to parent the IK chain to a curve for smoother posing of the limbs? Either way, I will be holding off on this till after I have the mouth figured out.

Thanks :yes:

2

Regarding question 1, I’ve seen it done both ways, but the most common is mouth closed modeling, with rigging to open or widen it. A middle solution would probably reduce distortion.

Question 2: if you are going to move on the surface of a sphere, you’ll probably have to use bones rather than shape keys. The bone root should be at the center of the sphere.

Question 3: I think this is possible, but I think you’d want to parent the eyeball to at least three points.

Question 4: Check out b-bones and segments.