Fellow Blenderists, I have posted this thread for those of you who need help with rigging (including me). This shall be the rigging discussion page where I invite you all (and myself) to post your/our rigging problems and I personally invite Slikdigit, Sketchy and all the other rigging pros to post advice where help is needed. Please, post your problems here so we could all have a noob/newb haven in rigging and the Blender community can advance in animation and surpass Maya and 3Dmax.
Be proud of our 3-Dimensional kingdom where King Blender rules… ward off all mixers for it is time to Blend!
Ok first Problem for you is about bone axis: Is there any way of making a local Z axiz point the same ways as a global Z axis (up) without pressing Crtl-A and having to place it all back again? I can post pictures if required.
I’m not sure if this help, but in armature edit mode, if you pull up the object properties (ctrl N if I remember right) panel you can set the bone roll angle. I’ve used this to adjust axes before, but it took awhile to find it.
Falcron, did you mean how to set up the bones like in the video?
Take the mancandy file, make all layers visible and have a look at the first two finger bones of each finger. They have IK solver constraints on them and at the finger tips/in distance to the hand you also find the fitting targets, just analyse them.
You may also find this on the Mancandy Faq DVD, as well as in the “Introducing Character Animation” book by Tony Mullen.
what about this dude?? I’ll have to add fur too - do i create a duplicate and add him to the armiture too? I’ve cheated when it comes to building rigs for humans in that i’ve just appended rigs. but this is gonna be tricky - anyone want a go??
what about reordening shapekeys, and yes it is relevant to rigging, very relevant. Think about corrective shapekeys and driven facial shapekeys.
it’s annoying to say the least. (buggy)
EDIT:
and no, you don’t create a duplicate Just use the current mesh as particle emmiter. At least it was that way with the old particles, I must be one of the few that didn’t try an SVN build lately, but most likely you can still choose to display the particle emmiter as well.
Do you mean the Bsod tutorial, that one helped me but I still don’t understand everthing.
Edit: On my monkey, should I add an extra loop cut around the shoulder because when I use Auto IK the shoulder isn’t deforming the way I want it to and the elbow isn’t really deforming well either.
Coodle: I don’t understand how he did it because i’m pretty new to rigging and only now the basics of inverse kinetics. Do you know a good tutorial other than the 72 paged one in the bsod rigging tutorial, in other words: I am extremely lazy!
Concept 3D: I just don’t know how.
Auto Ik doesn’t help with resolving the deformation. It’s just a way to automatically create an IK chain. In order to make a real one you still need to know how to apply the solver. And even then…an extra loop cut will not help with deformation alone…shape keys will still be needed. 2 loop cuts will, though, because they create a face loop…which does help with deformation and may enable you to forget about the shape keys completely.
as far as you being lazy. I sympathize, I’m lazy myself. But blender is an application for those that are to lazy to learn it. Its only an application for lazy people when they already know how to properly do something…and look for a shortcut work around. As you know…blender has plenty of those.
I have a problem with my finger rig. When i rotate the armature in pose mode the vertex group assigned to it not only lags behind while rotating, it also shrinks.
@Concept 3D, you can control the bone roll angle for an individual bone with Ctrl+r in edit mode, with the bone selected. You can also set it in the transform properties panel, type n.
The bone’s y axis is always going to be longitudinal to the bone, so it’s difficult to get the bone z axis to match the global z without the bone itself moving. Usually all you really need to do is get the z axis pointing generally in the up direction, instead of the x axis pointing up.
Falcron, your vertex group problem might be caused by a wrong parenting of the mesh and armature. Try it this way: unparent the mesh by selecting it and pressing “alt-p => clear parent”, then reparent by selecting the mesh and next the armature and click “ctrl-p => parent to object (not armature)”…
It helped me at strange behaviour of the mesh when moving the armature though I don’t know why.
Edit: after having read your problem again now, it seems there must be something else wrong… parent to object was meant to help when the mesh is shooting forward when moving the bones
