Various stupid problems I cant figure out...

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi everyone!

Im trying to rig all sorts of stuff and have come up with a lot of general problems.
They range from not being able to see what I am doing to needing to automate things to make insane tasks a little bit easier.

First of all I need to be able to mirror what I am rigging, for example with a person there are a mere 21 bones below the shoulder and clavicle, this is a pain in the neck to have to do twice, but I am doing (rather failing) to do things with a around a hundred. How would I go about mirroring the other arm?

The next problem, and again I will use a human as an example, is being unable to see where the bones are in relation to the mesh, I use XRay for some but when you get into places like the hand its imposible to see what you are doing because at least from the side everything is on top of everything else.

Im using the human arm an hand here as an example, but picture something more like a centipede with branching arms… its hard to explain, but once I get past a human arm I can work on more complex stuff, for now I am stuck at the thumb…

Thats the two main ones, they are stopping me dead in my tracks since I simply cannot go past a certain point…

More later if I can get around these!

Thanks and cheers!

2

First of all I need to be able to mirror what I am rigging, for example with a person there are a mere 21 bones below the shoulder and clavicle, this is a pain in the neck to have to do twice, but I am doing (rather failing) to do things with a around a hundred. How would I go about mirroring the other arm?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc_zWUhSmvE

3

Hi !

For lisibility, change your armature display type to b-bone, and use longitudinal scaling (s) and transversal scaling (ctrl+alt+s) to differentiate your bones.

Hadrien

4

Hi you guys!
And thanks!

Both of those helped a lot, the video actually made sense (lots of them don’t or are too old) and was something I have been searching for for a long time, and that method of scaling using B-Bone is marvelous, at first I didn’t understand what was supposed to be happening but it works GREAT!
The funny thing was when I switched to B-Bone everything overlapped as big cube thingys, only when I used the scaling did it become obvious that this was very cool! It also helps with the automatic weighting I think, not sure on that but it seems that things are working better!

Thank you both again!

Cheers!!!
Mealea