The first of several is the “sphereman” animation practice tool from the cinema 4d section of my site. It has been converted for blender use. Check out the animation contest page from April to see what can be done with him. I will be hosting a Blender version of the contest next month, so keep your eyes open and give me suggestions for the competition.
All the models in the C4D section will be slowly making thier way to the blender section, one conversion at a time.
Hope you guys enjoy.
NOTE: Nathanial Shaw is the generous soul who re-rigged sphereman for Blender. He is also working on the “GeneriRig” model.
Hi randy, I had a look at your sphereman and I hope you dont take offence
but the rigging was a bit heavy, it redraws really slow, problerly due to the skinning.
Ive re-rigged him with a simular setup, but I changed the way the mesh objects were joined, and skinned the object with bone parenting which fits this kind of model perfectly, instead of soft skinning with vertex groups.
Yeah, the orginal file is indeed really slow. Mostly I archive this slowness when I autoskin a mesh. It really slows down blender, like you put out a Ram card
Thanks for your help. I agree. But I had someone else rig it for me. I am still very new to Blender. I come from Maya (at work), and c4d (at home) and i am still not sure the reason Blender makes things so difficult. Maybe one day I’ll learn.
One thing I noticed about the original rig Nathanial did that i did not like, was the way the “poll vectors” for the knees drew lines to the main bone instead of the knee itself. I am at work and dont have time to pull up the file you re-rigged, but is it possible to do that. It is just how i am used to working.
On a final note…Did any of you guys look at the movies from the c4d animation contest using sphereman. How many of you would enter that kind of contest, and how long would you like it to last. The c4d version lasted a month. Now we are moving on to a slightly more complicated model.
Glad I could help. I use maya at work as well and there are not many work
flow simularities between the two. You’ll get use to blenders querky ways
The lines from the pole vectors are just the way blender graphicly shows its parent/child links. If you want them to come from the knees its just a matter of changing the parent links from the root bone to the knees.
well i am just learing character animation and not a complex model is good for me
but i think this animation contest is something that should be taken seriously here. lately i see great images rendered with blender. so it is like a visual proof that the modeling and texture functions in blender are good.
but there are hardly any good animations.
right now i am not good enough for this contest.
but maybe after the summer.
If you will go watch the videos from the contest, you will notice that most of the entrants had little/no animation experiance. Out of the nine entrants, they submited thirty or so animations over the month long period. Using only the best as thier final entry. You can watch there progression in those videos.
Even tho it was a competition, we continually posted animations and qritiques for each other to help each other get better. It was not as much about winning as helping each other improve.
So long story short, you sound like the perfect person to enter the competition. If if you do not win, you will improve much quicker with the help of the other entrants.
