Hmm, perhaps I should have said hips now that I think about it…? Well, anyway that whole area seams to give me allot of trouble. Is it just simple as joint placement with a bit of weight painting?, If so my joints must be way off and/or my painting needs some work, anyway I figured if some pro’s dropped some advice on here it could help out a newbie or two such as myself,
Thanks!
I’m wondering the same thing myself. I’ve tried rigging after a long break, and the hip area is giving me a lot of trouble.
hey novaslayer, are you using 2.5’s autoweighting to start your own weight painting from? Are you asking about the placement of the joints or how you contrain them for animators?
When I’m animating I like to be able to either swing the hip below the torso OR swing the torso above the hip. rather than writing a pivot switching script, in my quick setup I just have my root bone for the body under the navel then a bone running down towards the groin (pelvis_swing) , then another bone running back up towards the tip of the root (pelvis_invert). I then continue the spine from there (spine1…). I break the chain of rotations at the tip of pelvis invert by offset parenting the base of the spine1 to root and adding a copy location constraint to spine1 (target of pelvis_invert, head/tail set at 1). I’m by no means an expert though.
As for joint placement in terms of bone position in real human anatomy versus bone position in rigging check ou this
http://www.riggingdojo.com/home/broadcast-archive-rigging-dojo-live/
its not a blender tutorial, a bit more software agnostics but the principles carry across.
One little side note, you have to have good geometry to the mesh to get good deformation.
Randy
hey Novaslayer,
it will depend on what the groin of your character looks like as to the best solution.
most simple meshes don’t need any special attention other than correct joint placement and weight painting.
but more complicated models aren’t always so easy
sometimes you can get away with rigging a mesh cage deformer instead of the actual model
other times you will need to create corrective shapes and then drive them automatically
(you might need more than one for the groin area - eg leg forward, leg back, leg side, body forward, body back)
post a wireframe of the model and we might be able to suggest the best method to use
All the above advice is good. The hips/groin area is complex because of the interaction from the torso above and the thighs below. It’s important to have well-designed loops in the hip/thigh joints, and also to have careful weight painting to keep the deformations smooth. Depending on your character, some sort of corrections to the deformation may be needed to prevent pinching and soda-straw collapse when the legs flex.
At the waistline a smooth blend of vertex weights with the next spine bone up from the pelvis is usually needed, the “pelvis” being the main hip bone, which, in almost every rig I’ve seen, is a single bone that controls the mesh from the navel down to the thigh joints, with multi-axis flexibility. Some rigs are set up so that as it is adjusted, various other aspects of the rigs adjust themselves with it, and in other (usually simpler) rigs, it’s the basis for all upper-body orientations.
Regardless of whether you go simple or complex with your armature design in this region, the deformation will always be highly dependent on mesh topology, so be sure to pay attention to how your loops are distributed in the areas of maximum flex. One cardinal rule I use is that you should add only the loops you actually need when building a joint area. Excessive loops cause weight painting issues and make getting the deformations smooth more difficult.
Thanks for the replies! I think overall I just need get down some more advanced weight painting and figure out the anatomy a little better, your comments helped allot.
