Does anyone know how to make a rig visible at render time?
Hellllllooooo? I’ve had 18 views and no replies. I need some help- fast.
I once achieved this on an older version of blender. Maybe 2.41? Or 2.45. Not sure.
Could you show me how you did it? It would be valuable information for many.
Why don’t you just render the viewport?
Well I just had an armature sticking out of its mesh and it rendered. But that was in an old version. I tried it with 2.48a and it don’t work.
freen’s idea would work though if you turned off your grid and your axis.
Okay, I’ll try.
I will follow this thread.
Well apparently the devs over did this along with the odd non logical cyclic dependicies “fixes” … I do remember back in the good old 2.42a release that the armature/empties/whatever “unwanted” 3D screen data like the parenting relationship dotted lines used to render in the viewport, and did render (if you hit the “landscape” icon with Ctrl pressed it would give you everything involved in the scene in an animation) … Now they don’t … And I just checked in the outliner, and no, apparently the the render/no render stuff (the eye icon in the Outliner) doesn’t matter, since it is always on by default … even with empties !
I will admit that for some odd masochistic reason I just spent a horrible evening trying to use a Ngon enabled piece of modeling software so I am not happy with devs in general … Tris are not evil … Ngons are …
But for your purposes, you can either try to use an earlier version (at the very least 2.42a - this was if I recall the last time I rendered the entire 3D window) or wait for 2.5…a (trust me it will be quite a few variations before the devs notice that having this utility was and will always be a good idea) or use a separate screen capture utility … You will only have to use the last option if you went nuts with some new constraint . Most of the more common ones are backwards compatible …
Also you might want to do a search for a python script that either someone involved with the “feathers” Argentinian movie that has been in the oven for a while or a danish/dutch dude has written (I am a bit foggy about this - but I do remember this) that converts an armature into a renderable mesh …
Wow. OK. I think I have 2.42. I’ll try. Thanks for all of your help!
As Freen said, just click the Render Viewport icon. it is on the far right of the 3D View header.
No Papa, like I said in my post even the render viewport function no longer renders the armature (along with all things that that don’t render in a “real” render) anymore . You have to go to to an earlier version to do that .
Render viewport makes armatures visible for me in 2.48a.
There is a script that turns an armature into a real mesh for rendering. Haven’t used it with recent versions of Blender but it’ll probably be fine.
http://www.malefico3d.org/blog-en/?p=13#more-13
HTH
MAJOR EDIT : So I noodled around with a rig just now and just for my edification tried the render 3D view thing … and surprise ! the armature did render ! But I set up my rig display in stick mode, and I was testing the 3D view render with the default octahedron, so I did some tests . Apparently there is a bug where the octahedron and the b-bone doesn’t render in the 3D view . But apparently this only has to do with 3D view render function . The Screenshot Subwindow (Ctrl F3) renders all of them just fine … 
Attachments
Vertex Pusher:
Hi, regarding the viewport rendering bug with octahedron and a few other bone draw modes, I remember that prior to the release of 2.46 or so, this bug popped up. After investigating this quite thoroughly back then, we reached the conclusion that this was really just a case of a few graphics drivers being buggy w.r.t. some of the functionality used.
Aligorith
This is all quite strange… maybe we should tell someone. We do want blender to reach perfection, don’t we? You guys are quite good at investigating bugs. Ever been to the Google Summer of Code?