Tail, tongue, toes...

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi Blender guys&gals!

I got myself into some deep… hm, won’t say that, cause I don’t like the taste of soap :stuck_out_tongue:
OK. I was modelling that Dino, and when I wanted to do the texturing, I was advised to do rigging first, so I can pose the model annd see if the textures work out.
Good idea so far, the only problem - except for Master Gingerbread I hadn’t done any rigging before. I discovered out how nice it can be to do some good ol’ riggin’, I just jumped in ass first and that was a bad idea.

So I’m gonna post my mishap of a rig here (odjin was friendly enough to do some of the head an neck section with the lookats and stuff).
I did ZanQdo’s rigging class, now I’m stuck at rigging the fingers with the y-transform bone action, but I haven’t really gotten into that. So that’s no issue yet.

Issues:
a) maybe somebody can take a look at the feet. I really can’t figure out what I did wrong. I applied ZanQdo’s “reversed something” foot rig, and the BSoD “funky chicken” rig, but I have several toes here instead of one bone branch for foot deformation, and the toes have one more joint. Actually I think that foot rig is no good at all, period.
b) something’s wrong with the heat on the chest. If you move the root bone far up, it stays planted :stuck_out_tongue: I dobn’t know what I did, and my brain is so fried I can’t even write this post properly anymore.
c) tail&tongue: probably I’m too stupid, but the BSoD resources are from 2006, so I don’t know what I’m doing wrong here. Odjin dug deep into his nerves and keyboard already, but I simply can’t figure anything out that works. Different names, different UI and so on.
d) eyes. I’ll figure that out myself, I hope.

Maybe some of you have a good resource on that that I haven’t got? Unfortunately Cpt.Blender doesn’t have a tail… or any other snake- like body part :stuck_out_tongue:

Attachments

velociraptor_rig_fix.blend (732 KB)

2

Hold on, taking a shot at it!

3

Eyes are generally done with a “track to” constraint. You just tell the eyes to track an empty, and parent the empty to whatever the eyes are following. I forget the hotkey for track to, ( ctrl T maybe? )but it’s probably in the constraints panel. For tails and long sinewy tongues, use an IK solver on the bone chain, or enable ‘auto IK’ in the armature buttons.

4

@Modron: I once tried to just rotate the eyes, but the texture would stay put :stuck_out_tongue: But I’ll figure it out. My good old Cpt.Blender!

@ZombieJohn: thanks, man :slight_smile:

5

No problem. :slight_smile:

6

@John once again: wow… that rig blows my mind. :RocknRoll: + :spin: + :confused: + :eek: = :smiley: (the last one is still missing, but in sight!!)

7

The chest “heat” is because there are multiple bones (vertex groups) assigned to that area, even though their weight value is 0.0. I.e. there is no reason to have the foot bones bound to those verts. Use the vertex groups panel (F9) to remove those verts from the unwanted groups. bb(ox) select alt-bb(ox) de-deselect is handy for that.

I’ll work on it and post a fixed version.

8

If you are rotating the eyes and the texture isn’t rotating, then you probably have ‘global’ checked in the map input buttons. just switch it back to ‘orco’

9

@Mike: still waiting :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: It would be really interesting to see your approach. ZombieJohn already delivered a big thing there, so I’d like to see what you come up with if you find the time!

@Modron: I have it UV mapped - so it’s set to UV? :spin: