that was intensly coolio. 5* from me 
Thanks for the freakin’ suggestion, but it doesn’t address the main issue. I’ve got it working okay for the purposes of this clip, but longer term the search continues for a decent guitar strap rig. That would be freakin’ sweeet.
(Can you tell I’ve been watching too much family guy?)
That’s actually pretty consistent with the long fluro light that’s above him. I used an area light, and I reckon it’s behaving pretty realistically. You don’t get hard shadows from a furo light.
Yup. Those are the chords/notes. Lotta work there, but I play guitar on the track, so it had to be right, or I wouldn’t have been able to watch it. I have fantasies of developing a script that reads guitar tabliture and turns it into hand animation. One of these days…
Have you seen the sound tracker demo floating around? There is a video of ManCandy playing drums to a speed(?) metal song, you might be able to use that somehow to get the fingers tracking, I think the fingers look pretty realistic (and I play guitar). I’ve got to pop out now, otherwise I’d dig up a link for you. Cheers.
Nup, I haven’t…
…and I’ve looked, too. Got a link?
Here ya go.
The thread that contains the script:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=113227
Here’s a short clip of the ManCandy drumming vid:
I can’t seem to find the full version on there
Found it on Vimeo
http://vimeo.com/874779
I’m not 100% sure he used that script, though.
I found myself humming the tune from your video, the other day. 
Cool. Thanks for the links!
I actually used the audio analysis script (that technoestupido mentions) to make the strings vibrate. Of course, that meant generating the right waves for each string.
Interesting to see that when getting ManCandy to drum accurately, he let the character animation side of things slip. Much like mine. That’ll be the challenge, I’d say.
The thing I’m thinking of should be able to deal with any number of strings, so that would cover guitar and bass. Hopefully we can end up with a ManCandy band!
re: humming…
Yup, Chris has a knack for writing some diabolically catchy tunes.
Awesome fingerwork on the chords, very impressive.
How did you animate the chords fingering?
The way springing to mind is to pose each chord fingering, a few neutral positions, a few ‘hand-off’ positions with fingers more spread, one or two ‘flair’ positions (hand completely off neck), and then just synch each chord pose with the music, surround each pose with a neutral pose or hand-off pose, and throw in a few others for good measure, then clean it up afterwards.
Is this the sort of thing you did? Or something completely different?
Another way would be to have different hand/neck positions, and empties for each used fret, then use these as targets for finger bones, each grouped into chords to be re-usable.
I am very new to animation and like to see what techniques people use, hence the interest. Feel free to tell me I don’t know what I am talking about (but I already know).
My problem is I still don’t know what blender can and can’t do, and where to look to find it (keyword searches are hard when you don’t know the proper name for what you are trying to do)
dont bumb up old threads…unless your the owner…sorry…
I made five bones that were parented to the guitar bone and used IK constraints to link the finger (and thumb) tips to those bones. That way I could animate by blocking out the chord shapes (with a bit of cut and paste to speed things along) and then polish the movement later.
I did it this way because it meant that since the IK target bones were parented to the guitar, I could rotate the guitar and the fingers would move with it.
If I had have just animated the finger bones directly, then anything I did to change the movement of the guitar (including any body movement) would’ve meant readjusting the fingers and all their chord shape animation.
Blender can do much. Think of it like any other instrument. You have to put plenty of time into learning it, and don’t expect immediate miracles to happen, but the only way to make it worth you while is to keep going.
One good thing is that since you’re just starting, you aren’t likely to notice the limitations just yet…
Also, if you’re looking for resources, BA is a great start.
well, might be a little late… but you could rig the strap with a curve modifier and use hooks to animate it…
It’s not too late (I’m still thinking of doing another version).
However, I did try the curve modifier. The trick I couldn’t get past was how to keep the curve the same length, and thus prevent one end of the strap from coming free of the guitar.
You’re right though, I think curves are the way to go. I just have to come up with how to do it properly. Any suggestions are welcome, of course…
Well to keep the strap from detaching from the guitar you could stretch the mesh along the curve length so it stretches the mesh… or another idea have some kind of constraint on the curve hook (but i am unsure of how to go bout that…XD)
this may give you some ideas… http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/feature-videos/?video=modifier_stack
MAN, he’s ugly! But in a good way! Apart from the hair there’s one more problem, there’s a sharp color change in the strap, or am I missing something?
Nup, you aren’t missing anything…
…except you’re probably talking about the still and not the animation. For the final render of this draft I did some node trickery to smooth that out.
(This is still a WIP, by the way, I do intend on making a new version.)
lumpycow: I missed your comment when you first posted it. The thing is, a real strap doesn’t stretch very much. I tried using hooks that constrained the strap at both ends, but the problem there was maintaining the length of the strap. In reality, the strap should restrict the movement of the guitar itself (like it does in real life.) but damned if I can figure out how to achieve this.
BTW, when I visited the Blender Institute last December I asked Nathan (cessen) if he had any ideas about this, and he pretty much suggested what you did, but wasn’t sure if it would work.
Perhaps the guitar strap issue is worthy of a new thread…
On the strap issue, I found this idea on an old CGTalk thread, about the same thing, different app.
I came up with another solution that works pretty well. I created two extra bones that go from the spine root to the guiter strap knobs. This way I can bind the torso along with the strap to the spine and strap bones… Then I weigh the tips of the straps to the strap bones, and the rest of the strap to the spine bones, everyones happy. Then I parent ther guitar itself under the spine root. Its a pretty simple solution with a fairly good result.
I know this is an old thread, but you may find this useful: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=130949
cheers
That’s pretty much exactly what I ended up doing. There must be a better way…
…still pondering…
I’ll be back with more in a few months.
(thanks for the script, Broken!)
Good work. Really top quality animation.
bumped again!
thanks freen,
I really love this song/clip/animation/story.
I must have watched this 10 times at least.
& the first version.
You are an inspiration & very talented artist.
This really belongs in the gallery.