I don’t think I have any claim to fame for blender Rigs. I did a Maya-centric course for the past year and made a bit of a stir because I used Blender for my main modeling.
My rigs in Maya were very similar setup to your one in Blender, and I added my own ideas… (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehInENTz33U :o) but I would love to transfer it onto Blender… I thought some of the things your rig showed were Maya-specific ideas. Pity there is little documentation freely available on the advanced rendering tricks (most of those are simple like parenting controllers etc).
The expression editor is a powerful but simple tool in Maya. Basically, for any object or property, you can make it point to a formula of other objects or properties… a bit like… Left_hand.LocationX = 2 * L_hand_Ctrl.LocationY
…would make the left hand get its X position from and object (or slider control) which can be moved in the Y direction. The hand would move twice as fast as the controler moves. Once this is entered into the expression editor, the X direction of the left hand would become locked to the expression and would not be dragged by the mouse.
I’ve not quite digested your answer on how you managed to change the look of he bones (e.g. the eye tracker bone) into curves. You say you parent the bone to an empty and the empty to a standard curve? How also did you hide things (and how do I unhide them)?
No that’s not it. I first made curves or meshes that I shaped like I wanted the controls to be. Then I converted them all to meshes.
I then told each bone I wanted to have another shape to use this or that helper object as a shape. So the shapes you select in the rig are actually still just bones.
Since all these objects consist of lines, and can’t be seen in solid view, I set the armature’s properties for display to xray and wire.
Then I parented all these “helper” meshes to an empty. I parented that empty to the waist, and hid the empty with all the helpers at the waist, or cog area. If you open the outliner you can see how it’s done.
edit: no thanks, my pleasure.
Well you can drive an (A) objects X location with another (B) objects Y location for instance, by using that (B) object’s y location as a driver for the other (A) object. If you set the IPO curve to extent mode extrapolation, the effect is infinite.
I don’t think you can make that work for local coordinates though…
That’s where constraints could be convenient i think (just brainstorming here).
But you can’t set a constraint to copy say a location or rotation from object A’s X axis, and use it on object B’s Y axis. Not yet anyway. With pyconstraints in 2.46, this should be possible.
I think from what you described as the expression editor, that you can get those kind of results by using pyconstraints and/or IPO drivers.
I’ve updated the files, both the mirrors and my website have been updated.
Should be 2.46 compatible now. Links in first post.
@ Lancer:
here’s also a link to a small file with 3 cubes in it. One cube uses the other cube’s local y location to move twice as fast in the x direction. move the parent cube and nothing happens, move the driver cube and the first cube moves as well. http://rapidshare.com/files/113235952/XY_drivenloctest.blend
you probably knew about that trick allready, but well, just in case…
Sorry man - that’s the part I don’t get. I can’t see any button in the armature / bone options to take shape from poly… only Octahedra, Stick, B-bone and Envelope.
How did you link them to steal the curve or poly shape? In Maya it was a simple case of parenting.
EDIT: Just noticed your cube blend. Thanks! I’ll look into that one as well. I know the trick in Maya well enough but for Blender it’s a different set up that I will need to learn all-over.
This is sort of off topic, but at least it helps. So basically type the name ( or copy paste )
into the OB field. If its a curve you’ll want to hit that W button, to tell it to only draw it wireframe style.
something else:
WOOT! this got on blendernation, if anyone start posting weird things or starts
claiming : “I’m gonna rock pixar” or something similar, it’s not me, it’s our IT systemmanager who was smart enough to let me know he plans on pulling such a joke on me now that my rig got “blendernationed”
It’s friday, monday’s a free day, and the weather is going to be great this weekend.
Good times…
I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been dissecting your rig and I’ve learned a lot from it.
I started by trying to study your rig and then build my own for the project I’m working on, but the human characters in my film are so inconsequential that I just couldn’t justify spending any more time on the rigging (I’m already at about 60+ hours on this guy as it is… not that you could tell by looking at him). So, I ripped out my rig and put yours in.
Anyway, the amount of information I’ve learned from matching your rig to the mesh has been incredible! I just got through redoing all the face shape keys so that the expressions would work – I finally understand what IPOs are for. (Well, kind of.)
I did spot one error. The brow bones have a Z location lock that prevent them from going below 0, which means that the brow_down shape keys can’t be used. I change the Z lock minimum to --0.25 and it works now for me.
If I recall correctly, I think you also accidently named one of the shape keys angry_eye instead of eye_angry. Not that it hurts anything.
It’s a beautiful rig. I don’t have a ton of experience with quality rigs but, at least compared to the rigs that I’ve managed to build, using this rig is a joy. The time you put into this really shows. Great work!
(And, don’t worry, when my project is done, I’ll send a copy your way. I already owe you for the help you gave me a couple months back as it is.)
Thanks, I’m glad you people put it to good use, that’s what I released it for.
I really liked that toonbot you showed in your thread a while back. Is the human with the rig going to be the same style? You better send it along when it’s done because I want to see it
I’ll look into the bugs you mentioned. I plan to upload a new version of all my character rigs to my site a bit later down the road. I’ll clean a few things up that can de done in better ways in 2.46 that weren’t available in 2.45, and I’ll make sure I also get that bug you mentioned.
The shapekey is a remainder of 2 different versions I think… I made two or 3 different angry shapekeys and had to get the names to stay pretty much the same without using things like eye_angry1/2/3 etc, that would’ve been trickier to remember which was which.
Soooo, how is your project/animation coming along?
Could you possibly do a small tutorial on the bone display objects?
I have tried to follow your dialog with Lancer but I’m still not getting it totally.
How do you size the controller to be of a suitable size for the character/objects mesh but then have the actual controller mesh scaled down to be placed inside the mesh?
Also how would you adjust the orientation of the controller.
Like in the attached sample file where I have Suzanne (The monkey mesh) placed in layer two linked to a empty there, and in the first layer I have my object weightmapped to my armature of two bones and one of those bones set to use Suzanne as its draw mode. So how would I adjust both the size and rotation of Suzanne as a drawn mode in layer one? If I scale the mesh in layer two it has no effect in layer one.
@petrikNZ: in the button panel, in the armature tab, when you’re in pose mode, there is a button to select the bone display object. You can toggle wireframe for it on/of as well.
scale the mesh in edit mode. scale down to fit inside character in object mode afterwards.
The size of the controllers is determined by the size of the bones themselves.
If the bone’s length = 1 BU, then the bone will display at scale=100% of the display object.
For the rotation, you just have to think ahead and rotate the object in edit mode accordingly.
@pterandon:
The license is the same as the original release. That’s why the thread’s title is rerelease. It is a text file in the zip, and a text file in the blend file, which you can see by default when opening the blend.
