Steve Lund Rig.blend (2.7 MB)
Hi Folks:
I have a rig here that I constructed following a tutorial so far, it seems to be working ok, but I wonder if it could be better. Is there a way to “optimize” the rig and make it work better, or be better aligned etc?
Tim
Looks fine. I don’t see a mesh. Rigs aren’t really solo things-- you need a mesh, and weights, to judge them. It’s simple enough, can’t really be “optimized.”
Action constraints on the fingers aren’t working for me, presumably they do something with bending the fingers in a manner more easily animated, that’s fine. Copy rotations from the IK targets to the feet look backwards to me, I’d reorient the IK targets and move the feet to a different bone layer.
If I were to mess with this rig, I’d add arm and leg twist bones first, add foot roll controls second. Other things you could do are add more spine bones (but three spine bones + 1 neck are fine for, say, video game work), add IK switches, add metacarpal bones, work on automatic clavicles. But you sure don’t need to do any of that. Just depends on what you want to animate.
WOW, thanks for the ideas, a lot of that I am not sure how to do, This is a learning rig to learn how to animate, my eventual goal is to be able to have characters in houses that I draw doing things, cooking, relaxing by the fireplace, playing games in the game room etc. almost like a short film or something as the camera wanders through the house. I thought the robot would be a good starting point as I dont need to worry about clothes and things like that for now.
TIM
That’s a good example of how it’s hard to judge a rig without a mesh 
However you model your robot, that’s going to end up defining what you need to do to get everything moving right. A robot might have pistons, supports, cables, springs; but they might not have twist bones, or the might have multiple bones for multiple axes (like a hinge->twist->hinge shoulder). Just depends on how it’s modelled.