Okay so I’ve been trying to learn animation using armatures to rig a character to move and have been having difficulty.
I have a tutorial that tells me to “adjust the Pole Offset value to -90.” I can’t find where that is. How do I do this?
I’m having other problems, but I might find the solution if I backtrack a bit. One is that, for example, I have an arm, but I have made other objects on that arm, like a hand, wristbands, and others. I don’t quite know how to get them to stay together when I rotate the arm and such, I tried joining the objects, maybe it involves parenting or something. As I’ve said I’m quite sure it is a simple problem and if I keep trying and keep reading I’ll discover what the solution is, thanks.
it would help if you could post the .blend file.
Shoot, I don’t have it on me right now. I’ll have to get it tomorrow thanks.
“pole offset value” is a property of the IK solver, which you will find in the edit panel of the bone you applied it to in pose mode (yellow).
Getting multiple objects to deform right is a process of trial and error, and is the art of weight painting 
Weight painting you say? I haven’t tried that yet. Anyways as requested here’s the file in which I’m having issue with: http://www.mediafire.com/?zwgkyxg4idz
I really need to figure out this rigging thing because I’m making the characters for a videogame and have to have this work. Right now he is just a torso and I have had issue with trying to parent the bones and stuff so any help would be greatly appreciated!
^There’s the blend file if I could just have some help, I really want to learn this, but am having problems parenting the bones to the mesh, thanks.
I recommend you join all the objects into 2 meshes. In one mesh, join all the objects that you want to bend (arms, neck, hands, and likely the whole torso except for the shoulder plate) and in the other mesh join all the objects you don’t want to bend (cuffs, head, shoulder plate). Now weight paint both meshes.
For the rigid mesh you will want to assign each part a weight of 1. For example, the entire forearm cuff (or whatever you call it) would be assigned a weight of 1 to the forearm bone, the head mesh would be assigned a weight of 1 to the head bone, etc…
For more help please refer to the tutorials found on my blog http://rigging-repo.blogspot.com/search/label/Tutorials
I am also working on a tutorial series to explain the character development process in Blender, which I hope to complete soon
**By the way, your character is VERY high poly for a game! You might want to look into normal maps, or just simplifiy the model…
Thanks, that is an interesting idea! I will try that. I know it is high poly for a game, but the secret is that it is a 2d side-scrolling shooter. I’m going to place the camera facing the character on the side and just do a jpeg render of the animation and use that. I will have the spit-shine graphics of 3d with the simplicity of 2d.
Further queries:
I can get the head to work with the armature using vertex groups fine. Odd thing is that when parented to the bone the head turns 90 degrees Z and I have to reposition the head. I can live with this, but it is a big hassle so is there a way to avoid this?
So If I do like you say above the wristbands should move with the mesh of the arm? because I can get everything else to work with that except for the wrist so I want to be 100% sure I can fix that thanks!
Once the wristbands have been joined into a single mesh, you can easily skin them by selecting all the vertices of the band in edit mode (make sure backface culling is disabled - so front and back faces are selectable), and then assign them to the forearm bone vertex group with a weight of 1.
Thank you so much feelgoodcomics! With your help I was able to solve most of my problems. Although I’m still having some issues, I’m confident that in time I can fix that too now that I understand rigging a little better.