I am relatively unexpirienced with the ins and outs of Blender, but esecially with rigging. Anyway, does anyone know the best way I could rig a this robot so that it stays rigid like real metal? I have tried a few rigging techniques and I just can’t get it. :eek: I have searched the web for tutorials on this kind of thing but they were pretty limited. Any help would be hugely appreciated!!!
Unfortuantely I cant seem to get the .blend to upload but I will try and work on that. For now I have uploaded a picture of the robot.
You could do a couple of things to achieve the results you want. You could separate the mesh into individual objects and parent each object to its appropriate bone. You could also leave the mesh as one object and use vertex groups to control which parts of the mesh deform with certain bones. You can mix and match these techniques… It depends upon what you want as far as movement of the character.
It kinda reminds me of pantin, an excellent character created by kiopaa. I’d like to draw your attention to one small thing, though. The feet look like they are one solid object, you might need to change that so you can bend the foot at the ball of the foot, for walking.
Hey I took your advice and I now can move the bones around fine, but Im having a ton of trouble with the ik constraints. I will try to explain as well as I can.
I need a bone to move the whole body with and that all other bones are connected to. Unfortuantely, whenever I parent my bones to this central bone, the ik from the hand bone changes from connecting to the shoulder to the central bone. This totally screwes up the ik and makes it move funky. I dont know how to connect my shoulder bones to this central bone without the ik switching to the central bone.
That may have come out as complete gibberish but Im not sure how to word it and I cant upload the .blend. If anything, could someone point me to a tutorial on how to us ik constraints? Im completely lost.
In the panel for the IK constraint there is a field ‘ChainLen’, set that to the number of bones you want the IK solver to work on. For example, if the IK constraint in on the lower arm and you want it to affect the lower arm and upper arm, set chainlen = 2. Can’t think of any good beginner tuts on IK’s off hand…
Wow thank you Randy and Mike! That was exactly what i needed! That suggestion did the trick and the rig is working like it should. Thanks again for helping a beginner figure this out!
