Rigging a COMPLEX foot!!! (Now Posed!!!)

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1

Hello,

This is actually my first time rigging, truly ‘rigging’, anyways. I’ve watched Bassam’s talk on rigging numerous times, and to be honest, I haven’t quite figured it out. The reason, I believe, is that my model’s foot is a bit more complex.

The trouble I’m having is trying to keep the toes on the ground when I lift the heel. I’ve tried diferent kinds of parenting and even IK constraints (which I could be doing wrong, but I doubt it).

If anyone has any kind of detailed information, I’d appreciate it. BTW, I’ve already consulted the Blender Manual as well as a lot of information from the Blender Wikipedia!

Thanks in advance!

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2

Bassam’s foot rig contained a reversed bone that helps with this hinging problem. I don’t see it in your rig, but perhaps you’ve hidden it. Gimble wrote a tutorial on Stride bones that includes a great step-by-step on how to build Bassam’s foot rig:
http://www.telusplanet.net/public/kugyelka/blender/tutorials/stride/stride.html

Great looking model btw.

3

Thanks for the link, CD38! I’m looking into it right now. I’ve thought about deleting all of the individual toe bones and just having one bone control all of the toes. That might help a little bit. I’ll be working on it today.

BTW, thanks for the compliment! ;D

4

Thank you so much! To show my appreciation, here’s a rough pose I did of the lo-res mouse after I fixed the rig.

Thanks again! God bless and happy Blending.

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5

that looks really nice. are those low poly shaped the armatures as well?

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I’m not exactly sure what you mean, but I’ll answer the way I misunderstood you. Who knows, maybe I really did know what you were asking. ;D

I modeled the low poly mouse in order to animate with faster interactivity. The armature is separate. The low poly mouse is just a stand in so that I can quickly block out the animation.

I hope that answered your question. If not, I appologize, but could you re-word your question? I’m sure it’s not your fault! :slight_smile:

7

Looks cool, so are you going to show us a rendered animation of it? :smiley:

MicWit

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Actually, as I’m told, the final short film will probably be airing in Australia once it’s finished. And to answer your question, yes, I might post some test animations just to get some feedback. ;D

Thanks. God bless!

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Hi fmkguy,

This looks great so far, but now I’m not sure what you mean with your answer… (I’ve done some armature modelling, so I have a good idea what you guys are talking about)

You say “in order to animate with faster interactivity”, but at the same time you say “so I can block out the animation”… What do you mean by that?

Also, you say “the armature is separate”, which means your model is not parented to the armature? So how do you then want to animate and get faster interactivity?

Now I’m the one who asks: can you re-word your answer?

BTW, I suppose your mouse will have fur. Then you may run into the same problems I ran into:

  1. Unless your poly count is higher than mine, you may end up with http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=64951.

  2. I suppose your mouse may just be a single colour, otherwise you may have the following problem too http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=64853.

I’ve not been able to overcome these problems, and have logged these issues as bugs, but do let me know if you were able to resolve them. I’ll let you know if I find out more…

Cheers.

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Okay, I think I’m finally understanding what everyone is saying! :smiley:

As I said already, I knew I was the one who was confused. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Thank you for the reply, AnyMation. I’m sorry I was so confusing.

I’m new to this stuff, so here’s another try at answering your questions. Thanks for your patience.

To answer your first question…

 First of all, I've never really thought about the low poly model as being an "armature," or at least I've never quite used those words to describe it. I kind of refer to it as a "low poly stand-in" for my higher-res mouse model. I'll be using this low poly model to block out the motion for my 3D animatic. (Like I said, I'm new to this, and have never animated a character in my life - just simple camera stuff.) I hope that clears up the first misunderstanding.

As to your second question, the model is parented to the armature (but I guess when I say “armature” I’m thinking of the “bones” used in Blender,not the “low poly” model).

I still sound confused, don’t I?

Well, anyways, I got the idea from Autodesk’s 3DsMax. Looking at it from that perspective, I can see how one could look at it as an armature. I guess I never thought about it that way.:o

Attatched is the picture that I used as reference to build my “low poly” model.

Oh, I almost forgot about the rest of your post!!!

Actually, I’m looking at trying not to use “fur” on the mouse. Instead, I’m trying to get the effect that I’m looking for by using color+bump maps. I still don’t know if I can pull it off…Remember, I’m new at this. The only thing I really know what I’m doing is modeling, and even that could still use a lot of work. :slight_smile:

About the color of the mouse, it will be multi-colored. I’m trying to get a semi-real mouse for this project.

I hope that answers all of your questions. If not, or if I still don’t seem to be coming across in the right way, forgive me. I’m terribly sorry, but I still don’t quite know what I’m talking about, but I’m working on that! :smiley:

Thanks again! God bless!

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Human_Skeleton.jpg680×706 58.3 KB

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Hi,

When we speak about armature, we mean “bones”: an armature consists of one or more bones. (I have not yet tried to find out why it is called an armature in Blender, because I am used to an armature being something in an electric motor.)

I think what Tyaedalis and I were thinking about was that the bones can be represented as rectangular, scalable “boxes” that seem to be what you are trying to do. They are not low poly objects, but actually the bones represented as scalable rextangular boxes. The boxes can also be seperately scaled in the X, Y or Z coordinates.

The normal bones as octahedrons look like this:

When viewed as B-bones, they look like this:

…And finally, one can scale them to look like this:

(This one does not show the fact that you can scale the box in only one direction too).

Scaling perpendicular to the axis of the bone is done with Alt+S.

You seem to have two models: a high poly - and a low poly for animation. Using the above, you can obtain a rough approximation of your figure (not polygons at all), which exactly follow the bones during an animation.

I’m not sure whether this is of any value.

AnyMation

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Thank you for taking the time to try clearing this up. I finally understand what you guys were asking!!! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

AnyMation: Correct. I actually have three models of the same mouse - lo-res, mid-res, and hi-res. Of course, the high resolution model is for final rendering, only.

The only reason I have the lo-res model is because, as far as I’m aware, you can’t render bones, only objects. I need to be able to actually render the lo-res model, not just view the animation in Blender. I’m actually getting ready to start work on my 3D animatic and that’s where I’ll be using the lo-res mouse the most. :smiley:

BTW, that’s what I meant when I said that the “armature was seperate.” When I refered to the armature, I was refering to the bones, not the model itself.

Also, the reason Blender calls it an armature is because almost all other 3D packages also refer to them as “armatures.” Why? I don’t know, but I do know that the “bones” (or “rigs”) used for stop-motion animation and “claymation” are also called armatures.

Thanks again for the information and help!