As in, you’ve been working with the same areas of Blender for years, but then you come to a situation where it seemed like to get over it, you had to start learning an area that you haven’t so much as touched in all the time you’ve been using the program.
- NOTE: My contribution is kind of long, but the basic point is easily found at the bottom.
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To start off, there was a time recently when I felt that I finally had to get in touch with how the rigging system worked in Blender (armatures and all that). Over the years, this was an area that I more or less tried to avoid, but my efforts to start learning a thing or two to get things done started when adding a new enemy to my platform game in the BGE.
You see, most of the objects I made in the game engine were either simple shapes doing this or that or platforms or objects using a simple loc/rot/scale keyframe action, but then in this instance I wanted to add a flying object with a twirling blade, usually I would use two objects to make such a thing but this time I figured I better get to grips with the armature system and use a bone to animate the blade.
So I add a bone and just…sit there, I had no idea how to make it move anything and still didn’t have much a clue after reading a little of the docs. Luckily that handy ‘automatic weighting’ tool helped guide me to getting a bone to spin the blades.
That was just the start, in a still image, when I create an organic model such as a Dragon, I would use vertex selection, proportional edit, and rotation with the cursor as the pivot point as a way to post the model for an image. The problem with this, I had to be rather careful when doing it and to make it worse, I had to select the same sets of vertices everytime I wanted to do it, this might seem straightforward unless your dealing with the mouth and you had to do precision selection work to change positions there.
Pretty much, what ultimately got me into finally rigging my Dragon model was when I took the model used for my avatar and worked to put his tongue back in his mouth, this was a really tricky process and I realized that was probably time to make posing my Dragon easier by actually doing work to rig the thing.
So I start creating some bones to move his head, I had no idea what to do at first, as I had to learn so much as how to set up the vertex groups and figure out how to get falloff working when the bone is moved, I eventually got that done and realized that I would need to learn a bit more in rather quick succession to get the face working.
So it took me less than a day to go from barely knowing anything to getting a basic system for the face working, but to do this, I had to think of the big picture of parenting systems and how to apply it to the facial bones (so they move with the head(, spline IK and other constraints, and parented curve hooks. Also along the way the discovery of nice little techniques like changing the weightpaint color preference to catch vertices that have a weight very close, but not quite at zero.
As far as parenting systems go, I already had some knowledge as I used it plenty of times before, but this was the first time I actually utilized multiple bones and control types for anything, which is now making the posing a bit easier and eliminating the tedium of trying to poke around and moving vertices.
You see, I don’t know how many people know this, but the Dragon model in question is the same one I’ve had as an un-rigged posed model in images here and there for more than five years, the same one that lead to people in the Finished Projects forum chiding me for not taking the additional effort to actually get it rigged so he can be posed in a ‘proper’ manner. I guess in a sense, doing it after five years is better than a continued, indefinite avoidance.
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That’s all I have to say for the thread for now, what about the experiences you’ve gone through when you needed to learn a new area to get something done (or make it easier depending on the scenario).
