This is a character I’m working on based on a little Icon/Avatar a friend of mine came up with. I decided that I’d like to pose and animate it. Are there any good tutorials on building a simple armature for a character like this?
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Ha ha, looks like you did a good job! I remember you talking about it at the user group meeting. Here’s a link to the BSoD Introduction to Rigging, hopefully it should have what you need. You could check out the rigging section of the Introduction to Character Animation tutorial too, if you want.
Ya. Looks sweet man. Hope LOTR Junkie’s site helps. I can’t wait to see this animated.
Thanks LOTRJ,
I still have a lot reading to do, but considering that this model is supposed to be a mechanical robot with limited movement, maybe I should forget about making an armature and just parent the different parts of the model and us FK instead of IK?? Meaning… I’m really not trying to deform the mesh in any way.
Or am I thinking about this wrong?
Technically I suppose you could just parent to empties and animate those, but an armature with vertex grouping would still likely be your best bet. It’s true that you don’t need any deformation, so you shouldn’t need to bother with weight painting.
Make it slightly more orange, and add some rust.
Turn the edge render on, and do a toon shader.
looks sweet, nice one
looks very much like a Mega Man character. Cool!
Haha I like this robot !!!
OK… Small update.
@tynach - OK, made it more orange, You were right, the orange looks better. Also - This is more of a “studio” light setup rather than sunlight. A simple UV mapped texture on the floor so it’s easier to see the ground plane.
@mmph - I don’t want to spend too much time with materials right now. Rather try to figure out this whole armature thing. I’m sure I’ll end up doing all sorts of Material/Render combos.
@kemmler - You are right. I think the head of the avatar may be an actual screen shot. The body was his creation though. I made the helmet a little different so it’s not a complete rip off. So it’s more inspired from Mega-man rather than a complete copy.
@LOTRJ - I did parent everything correctly (I think). For instance, I parented his foot to his lower leg, which is parented to his knee, which is parented to his upper leg and so on. Not sure if that’s right but I can rotate his head and his eyes follow, move his shoulder and the arms move. I may need some more of your help with canceling out the rotation on some of these objects. Not sure I’m doing it right.
@everyone else - thanks for the comments!
Another update…
The hands look a lot better now. Have the Object parenting done as well (I think). Now onto the Skeleton! Fun Fun Fun…
Oooh! Only flaw I see is the eyelids. They should go around the eye, not just be painted on the front. Great work!
P.S. I liked the old hands better.
I think you’re missing the point a bit… You parent the objects to bones in the armature, not parent objects to other objects and then to the armature. I’m not sure if double parenting would work, but I’m just saying it’s an extra step. Good work on the hands, I like them!
@saxafoner - Yes I was planning on fixing the eyelids so I could animate them a bit easier. I’m trying that tonight. As far as the hands go, I was mistaken about how the full hand looked and then my friend sent me some gifs of how he intended them to be so I updated them. I may change the color back to orange, I haven’t decided yet.
@LOTRJ - OK… I think I see now. But it’s done so I may as well see if it works. Now as far as canceling out the rotation on each object before I bone them, I may need your help on this at the next meeting!
hehe cool stuff. Just the hand… hmmm to simple… too flat.
All this caracter is rounded but not his hands
@CyaNn - I’m not sure I’m completely happy with the hands either, but I am trying to keep it in tune with the original avatar he came up with. In fact, here’s the “template” kit he came up with so he could just cut and paste to pose the character into different positions. You can see the hands are pretty much what I have right now.
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Good job!!
changing the hands would look better why not Make the body of the hand spherical “like your shoulders” and make the fingers tubular.
@VincentXD - It’s a thought, but as before, I’m trying to keep it as close to the original avatar as possible. Saxofoner said he likes the originals that I came up with, but to me they look more like Grill Spatchulas or maybe robotic oven mits! 
LOL! Plus there is the fact that the originals would be very difficult to animate if I wanted him to grab something or pick something up.
OK… so I started on the skeleton. Oh Boy, what fun… NOT!!! LOL!!! 
WOW! You never realize how much you DON’T know until you try something. But thanks to LOTRJ, the link you provided has explained quite a bit. Like how “Hinge” doesn’t do exactly what you think it would do.
So far I just have the arms done. I can now move/bend the arms around and the mesh doesn’t deform (that’s how it should be). What confuses me is the XYZ axis of the bones. If you look at the shots I provided, you can see that even though I copied and mirrored them that each side points in the polar opposite. Is that right? Should I change that?
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