I am a total noob at character animation. I have a deadline job and need a running man (not photorealistic).
I went ahead and made a makehuman (great model), and imported it ok.
Now I want to rig it as simple as possible, should I use bone heat? I really want to avoid painting vert groups.
I made a really dumb-dumb armature and parented it with bone heat but it makes a mess of some joints. What is the best way to achieve this? Should I get a premade rig and strip all the fingers and face stuff out?
How would I do that?
Hey thanks Atom, appreciate that. I’ve been checking out all the riggs around(from Blenderart mag 15) and there is some memory hungry mesh’s there! theres a great video series tut on rigging a makehuman model but it seems way more intense than I need.
Make-human produces very decent models. However if you want to animate them, you must rearrange some loops at shoulders and may be other areas. Also by the nature of muscle details you should add some other bones (deltoids and bicep at least) to simulate contraction and avoid weird deformations. My fact is you should not mix realistic models with poor un-realistic animation, this contradiction kills the magic in our brain when watching it, making it look un-pleasant or poor quality work. Bone heat will lead to great results, however you must always touch-up with weight painting. This combination could be a bit tedious. Get a simpler model to match your simple animation that you expect. make human makes considerable high poly models requiring most dedication to avoid strange deformation yet good quality results can be obtained if the right amount of effort is placed.
blenderguy2008 (it’s 2009 now ;)), yeah I found that out as I tried shoving other rigs over makehuman. Even using bone heat (cool) I tended to leave bits of mesh behind. And some rigs are way beyond me, I just have no idea about their workings.
I am happy with a comic book type human (think super hero) rather than a cartoon human or realistic human.
I just wanted something I could throw a mesh on (not easy) or generate an armature to fit my mesh automagically. I didn’t mind weird deformations of surface topology, as the render will probably obscure such artifacts.
what is so hard about putting the armature in pose mode and then selecting the mesh and go to weight paint and fix those knees and elbows just do the weird parts. Its the most fun I have had in blender, is actually weight painting my man mesh.
We are not gonna do your work for you especially when you have a deadline job.
You should definitely use bone heat, and then fix the weird area with weight painting it’s fun!
The tutorial from the essential blender on setting up a walk cycle is pretty awesome, it should be online somewhere…
Like so many deadline jobs this one fell through before I bothered to figure it out. But I will do it, I will. It’s just that it looks so hard, waaahhh poor me. hahaha