So in the video I just linked, this guy has a VERY complicated/detailed tank model, with an amazing rig system to boot. I was wondering, is it possible to create this rig to some degree in blender?
I have a very simple toy tank I made in blender about a year ago, and I was wanting to make a rig for it where it’s tracks automatically moved/rotated in sync with how much I moved the tank itself.
My guess is that Blender can match any other 3d software for equivalent rigging. The process will obviously be different, but if you can rig it in Maya, then you can rig it in Blender. I seem to recall there was a thread here at BA that discussed track rigging.
That is false, there are certain things we won’t be able to do with rigs in Blender until the depsgraph refactor is completed that are taken for granted in other animation packages. Nathan goes over it in some detain in his latest rigging DVD. Things like cyclical dependencies really mess up rigs within Blender and currently there is no way around this.
That having been said, I’d say that 95% of cases are riggable in Blender, and it handles quaternions better than any other package I’ve used. With some scripting and rig know-how I assume you’d be able to create a very nice tank rig in Blender.
Sorry I disagree with you. There is NOTHING you can not achieve with a little smoke and mirrors. This includes rigging. We may not be able to do the “exact same thing” but we can fake it.
YMMV
My I recomend my Tank Track tutorials as an example of what you can do with Blender?
There are 5 tutorials in all that take you through how to build a progresively more complex, yet more automatic (easy to animate) Track Rigg…
@ place57
I seem to recall there was a thread here at BA that discussed track rigging.
I have not seen one of late… can you direct me to that discussion because I came up with my solutions all on my own… having built simular Riggs in XSI…
It’s not a matter of disagreeing, you simply can’t do things like cyclical dependencies in Blender right now due to the outdated depsgraph. Certain other functions will also lead to rig and mesh data being desynced by one frame because of how the depsgraph tells different data structures how to update per frame. Until this gets fixed, there are quite literally things that can’t be done to standard production specifications with Blender’s rigging tools. As I said, you can get more info from Nathan Vegdahl’s rigging DVD where he goes over complaints about the rigging in Blender.
Until this gets fixed, there are quite literally things that can’t be done to standard production specifications with Blender’s rigging tools.
hummm this is interesting…
Having studied Nathan’s Humane Rigging DVD… I see where there were things that were ‘different’ than in other packages I have used… Lightwave, Max, Maya, XSI… and my Rigging experience with Max and Maya have been limited… but not with LW and XSI… I’m not seeing where the problems presented in Blender Rigging are any worse or any different than the ones I have encountered in XSI … I won’t really count LW because out of the Bunch LW is the worst at Rigging… XSI however is considered one of the top notch commercaily available Rigging Softwares… I can see where there are things lacking in say weight painting… and sculpting… and some areas like that… but I have been completely blown over impressed with Blenders ablitity to do Rigging…
Can you give some examples of where Blender is not up to snuff with say Max and XSI (which most consider to be Production capable …) Please don’t ignore this request… this would be good to know ahead of time as I have some job commitments coming down the road where I fully intend to use Blender as my platform…