Please rig all of the joints of this 90-foot tall mech robot.
I’ll give this a shot. The most complicated thing I’ve ever rigged was a set of desktop monitor cranes, so I’m quite excited to give this a go. I’ll hand off whatever I have around Thrusdayish~
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I’ve done as much as I’m going to on this project. Thank you for letting me play with your model, I was able to learn a lot. I do have some note for you though to help with projects like this in the future.
- Organize the project. I probably spent 2 hours deleting empty meshes and migrating components into basic collections. I was a huge time sink to get things sorted before I could even begin rigging.
- Clean up your meshes. I would have been able to make it so much further (setting up constraints, cleaning up edges between weight paints) if I could actually apply the paint. Every single object was at least 2 layered object, if not a dozen, which meant I spent very very long time super zoomed in messing with clipping distances just to get at some of the more troublesome vertices. Merge your meshes and clean your geometry so that its 1 nice topology
- For hard surfaces like this, don’t merge together the objects on the joints. Weight painting is super easy for a single hard surface. I spent a ton of time on the arms because each and every piece of the mess was tied in with every other.
- If you intend to rig something, keep it in mind early on. Almost every joint of this robot is a 1-D joint, making it where is can only swing forward and backwards without deforming the the axles. I know you were working off of a reference photo, but the joint are really where you should have strayed to make sure the the geometry aligned with how you intended the body to move.
- Reduce you vertices (this goes along with #2). You have way too much geometry, a lot of it is buried inside objects and not contributing to the render. I have a fairly good desktop with some beefy graphics cards and I had issues doing any amount of posing as my frame rate fell off a cliff. At the moment, you have about a 350k vertices. I’m willing to be that you could get this number down under 100k without a noticeable loss in quality if you get rid of duplicate vertices, get rid of intersecting geometries, back some UV maps instead of modeling each minor artifact, and deal with some floaters (I think about 10% of your objects have stray lines or vertices that aren’t part of the core mesh)
- Make sure you have applied the mirror modifier appropriately. I found about a half dozen object that I think should have been mirrored, but weren’t. Also, If you apply a mirror modifier, split the object into 2 objects, don’t leave them conjoined.
- Apply your scale and rotations once you’ve finished editing. Most manipulation of objects happen around its center point, but I’m guess by the looks of where most the center points were that you tabbed straight into edit mode, move the vertices where you needed them, and then never touched them again.
Sorry to be so verbose, you mesh looks quite good (by far better looking than anything I’ve ever made), but it was rather painful trying to work with. Here are a few note about where the project stands now that I’m done working on it.
- Some more weight painting it require, particularly on the hands (I didn’t make it to the fingers), shoulder, and hips.
- None of the items in the weapons pack are attached to the skeleton.
- Inverse kinematics need to be added.
- Constraints against scaling should be added.
- Constraints on the rotations and position of the bones also needs to be added.
Here’s the updated .blend file. Let me know if you have any other question. (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A8k-h-YeNx1VBMg2CSNbsw6S14PCrc6B/view?usp=sharing)
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Nice work Bekreth only a few Verts left not rigid, still nice work and clean Outliner.
LBJ make the best effort to not leave ngons in the mesh if you plan to use it in animations or games it’s a bad habit.
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Thanks!
I’m relatively new to blender and 3D modeling in general, so I don’t know all of the ins and outs yet. I’m sure I made plenty of mistakes.