Hey, everyone! I’ve modeled and textured (I guess material-ed it) and haired and rigged this tarantula. I’ve posted the .blend file below. You may be wondering why this is a work in progress, and that’s because it’s actually not finished yet. I need some advice to improve the rig, and also how to get the eyes and fangs to move with the tarantula. I’ve tried parenting them, but they don’t follow, joining them, but they deform. Any other suggestions?
EDIT: Go to the end of this thread to get the .blend. All of the ones before it were WIPs
The rig i belive is fine, but i think I see your problem. The tips of the legs dont have the fangs skinned to them, did you properly weight paint this? If you didnt delete all the vertex groups and weight paint, and if you did weight paint, still delete all the vertex groups and re paint. Also all your IK TARGET bones should have the deform turned off. I suggest parenting them to the body bone and make them perpendicular to the legs so you can see them easier. Each leg should be a complete chain of bones btw. For the eyes, parent them to the body bone and make a new bone in front of the body bone, and add a track to constraint to the eyes targeting the new bone, that way the eyes will follow that bone.
Hopefully i was clear, but if you have any questions…post away
BTW, no lattice is needed, latices are for deformations
One more thing, rig in rest pose, not some funky rotated one
[EDIT]:
Oh and please name your bones!
And speaking of naming, your spider is symmetrical so make the rig symmetrical, so you do half the work! (name the right side with a .R in the end then after applying all the IK ans stuff, select the right side SHIFT-D, S, X, -1 with the cursor in the center of the spider and pivot point set to the cursor.
Wow, lol, every second i look at it i find more stuff to comment about…Your bone rolls are all messed up…
Errm, nothing is changed, did you save before uploading? Did you upload right file?
I am kinda angry at computer now…I had a good rig going, and i was about to save and post it here, when i clicked something and everything went back. And Undo wouldn’t work!!!
(I had the body rigged for the attack pose, and the fangs, and and grrrrrrr) Anyway I will redo it tomorrow…
Alrighty, I rigged the body and one leg of the spider for ya, and I am actually kinda glad that my previous attempt got deleted, cuz i actually started from scratch today, instead of editing your armature, so I ended up with a cleaner armature! So anyway, I dont think I did anything complex but I can explain if you dont understand.
Now when you make the other legs, I suggest first of all completely finishing the right side, and then select the right side SHIFT-D, S, X, -1 with the cursor in the center of the spider and pivot point set to the cursor. Then W, 3 to switch the R.001 ending for the copied bones to .L
And Second, I suggest parenting the first 3 front legs to the head bone, and the back 2 to the Body bone(In the same manner I did the 3rd leg for you, with rood and Leg IK parented to the Body/Head whichever is appropriate), that way the Attack pose would work rather nicely i think…
Hopefully you learn something from this, and for a side note, this might not be the best way to rig, but i think it is better then what you had in the beginning.
Dont forget to name, and turn off deform for non deformation bones.
@Ricky blender, lol when if you dont know that, you should probably not “Help” you might confuse him more.
I already made a rig, so if anyone wants to make that one better, cuz it is better than the original.
And as for your question, the yellow bones have IK Constraint applied to them, and Green Bones have a Location or rotation constraint applied to them.
alright, I’m having problems now. Look at this and see; I’m sure I messed up the rig somewhere, but I’m not sure where. I changed the names a little so I could remember them easier, but I don’t think that’s the problem.
You forgot to set the chain lengths for the IK constrained bones.
Look at the Ik constraint for the bones that i did and you will see that your bones have chain length of 0 which means that the Ik spreads though the whole chain while you only want it to be to the roots of the legs
EDIT, I also would recommend building with octahedron visualizations, because then you can see the rolls of the bones and you need to make sure they are not all crazy rotated
Oops. Sorry, you’re right again. Thanks a lot! You’ve done enough to help that you could even call it your rig which technically, it is. I’m just copying off of it for the rest of the legs.
Alright, sorry again (I think this will be the last problem), but when I set the chain length, the bones straighten out some so that they’re not directly over the spider’s legs. Should I just move them into place, then apply rotation and location?
Ya, that happens cuz of the IK…I have not found a way to fix that. But when you skin it will not matter. And no dont move them in POSE mode when you it is called Pose mode for a reason, when building the armature, do all the movement of bones in edit mode. But again when you skinn it will not matter cuz the mesh will follow the bones.
When you parent the mesh, dont automatically create vertex groups, do it manually for better results.
