When the chips are down, the deadlines looming, Maya Lightwave, soft spoken graphic artist in the Backgrounds and Landscapes Division, Grunge Section, of a great metropolitan Computer Graphics Studio, steps into the break room, presses the secret button on the Espresso machine, takes a swig and emerges as:
Capt. Blender!!! ta da! 
:RocknRoll: Isnāt it more like :
Wonder Wu Man
???
Isnāt it more like :Wonder Wu Man
Naah, she had her teeth fixed when she was a kid. :eyebrowlift:
Me Likes alot! I wonder if thereās a bikini version. Good job Orinoco, I tried making a cartoon woman and itās actually pretty hard. I found itās much easier to model a real woman than it is to model a cartoon woman. Itās strange donāt know why that is.
I just got that book, it helps so much!
Sorry, no can do. Youāll have to be satisfied with this
So sad.
Thanks Orinoco! Very Interesting. Boobs and hands not a problem. In fact I rather enjoyed making the boobs, my biggest problem was getting the hips and knees to look right. Thanks again for the wire, Iāll use it as a template.
Hmmm, I think you must have missed a few steps in the tutorial. I know Captain Blender has a big chest but he certainly isnāt supposed to look like that!
Itās like this, AndyD, my old computer doesnāt read DVDās, so I couldnāt use Tonyās drawings for Capt. Blender. I went with this one, instead
or you could go for the fantastic 4. Blender style.
This would be Mrs. Blendastic 
Aws357, Mrs Blendastic, ha, ha, very funny.
Orinoco thanks for female character pic, a great reference pic, will come in handy soon. Now I understand where I went wrong. Real women have a .7 hip to waist ratio. But ultra sexy super cartoon women have these tiny, tiny, tiny impossible hips. And I thought I was making the boobs too small. That explains everything. Thanks again.
Extra long legs, too. Youāll notice sheās 4 1/2 heads from crotch to toe, but only 3 heads from crotch to crown. Were she a full 9 heads tall (to match her legs), her breasts wouldnāt seem so large.
Rigging is almost done, except for the hand actuators, which Tony suggests can be put off until after the rig is skinned. Iām at the point of putting bones onto separate armature layers, and have decided the pose bone layer will have:
Head
HeadStretchControl
IK_Arm_L/R
UpperBody
Shoulders
IK_Spine
Pelvis
FootRoot_L/R
Ball_Heel_Rotation_L/R
Root
Torso
A couple more will be added to the list when the hand actions are done.
I thought it might be useful to publish my Captain Blender Outliner View.
This basically shows whats parented to what. If your following along in this massive tutorial, youāll notice I havenāt got the hand actuators in there. Iām holding off on that until Iāve done the skinning. I anticipate a lot of detailed tweaking
:yes: Nice!
Actually, thinking of the Fantastic Four/Incredibles, the new Mancandy and Otto rigs with the stretch bones and lattices on the limbs might be a nice addition if you want to do some experimenting down the roadā¦
Iād definitely been looking forward to seeing how peopleās Captain Blenders turned out! This gives me the idea of posting a gallery of them somewhereā¦
I managed to screw up adding the ribs, somehow. As I recall, I selected the spine bone, or the stretchSpine bone, theyāre in the same place, and mirror extruded the ribs laterally. The first clue: they didnāt extrude symetrically, the one on the left was a bit longer.
I disconnected them, and moved them out a bit more, tried to get them evenly spread out, but no success. Now, in pose mode, they are jumping to the opposite side of the model:
Edit Mode, Rib_3_L is on the right side
Pose Mode, same rib has jumped to the left side, and completely messed up the modelās torso.
Any ideas on what I did wrong, and how I fix this?
[Edit] I deleted the offending bones, and did some research. Apparently only Fligh understands roll angle, and he has a hard time explaining it. At any rate: hereās the bottom line: The direction a boneās Z-axis points determines itās Roll Angle. For horizontal bones, Z should point up. For vertical bones, Z should point forward. For diagonal bones, if they slant to the front or back, treat them as vertical, if they slant to the side, treat them as horizontal. If they slant some other way, be creative, but consistent: if they are in pairs, make them matching pairs.
Hereās how to get there: always add bones in top view. Switch to other views to set them in place, but make sure when you add bones using the space bar youāre in top view. (I think extruding picks up bone roll angles from the parent, but I havenāt tested that yet.)
Fixing it once itās messed up:
Ctrl+N Clear Bone Roll Angle doesnāt zero out the angle, it resets it to whatever it started as. If the problem is adding bones in different views, worse, user defined angles, Ctrl+N is hopeless. It will simply recreate the original problem. However, Ctrl+R in Armature Edit mode, with an offending bone selected, will set the bone angle. So, turn on show axis, find the bones where z is off pointing in some funky direction, and Ctrl+r rotate that sucker so z is pointing in a good direction. Iām under the impression that close counts, here, eyeball up or forward is good enough.
Anyway, the vertex groups were still around waiting for some new bones, so Captain Blender is skinned. Still need to do a lot of tweaking, since the deformations when I actually move a pose bone are pretty awful.
Hereās the best she can do, for now.
This is really helpful. Actually, bone roll angles have are an area Iām still not 100 percent clear on, and that can be really problematic especially when you start using B-bones. The tip about adding bones in top view sounds valuable.
When all else fails, it appears it is still useful to set a selected chain of bones into a straight horizontal (arms, S>Z>0) or vertical (legs, S>Y>0,) line - then recalc roll angles, then reset each bone into the desired position.
In fact, add an armature in top view, immediately switch to side view (3) and drag the active tip down to almost vertical, extrude a bone down in this view then switch to front view and extrude another. Donāt try to be absolutely perfect in placement. You should have a chain of 3 bones pointing down. Draw Axes shows three Z-axes facing the rear (hopefully). Ctrl-N will reset some or all of the Z-axes to the front, depending on how vertical they are and which way they āleanā. Align them to Y-Axis (S>Y>Zero) then recalc again and the Z-axes should align to front. If they align to the rear, rotate the entire chain (R-key) clockwise in side view (3) so it lies flat (use CTRL to constrain rotation). Use S>Z>Zero, recalc rolls again, rotate back to vertical and recalc again. The damned things change as you rotate and recalc but this last recalc should set them with Z forward (Butā¦ if you rotate them back to horizontal, the Z points down and you have to recalc again to point it up).
There is obviously some bizarre and complex arithmetic at play here which is beyond some of us mere mortals. The above example uses Mac v2.43 and your results may differ and it will not solve all problems of incorrect angles. CTRL-R will let you manually set the angle but it will lead to trouble if you inadvertently reset roll angles with Ctrl-N later. Note that you can also enter a roll value in the transform (N-key) panel.
Adding in top view will definitely help keep things under control but itās not always the intuitive way to be adding bones into an existing armature where front or side view can āappearā to be a better option.
Damn. Are you saying Set Roll Angle [Ctrl+r} is temporary? That Reset Roll Angle [Ctrl+n} will mess it up again? Ouch. Double ouch, especially since Iāve just discovered that sometimes z axis has to point backwards to get an armature set-up to work properly (see Bone Roll Angles in my sig.) Iām going with turning axis names on when adding bones, and keeping the properties panel open so I can see whatās happening as I do it.
On the other hand, Iām finding that there are all sorts of interesting things that you can do with bone roll angles and rotation constraints. If you reverse the bone roll angle on a constrained bone (add or subtract 180 degrees) it will rotate in the opposite direction. I suspect that if you change the roll angle by only 90 degrees it will rotate the constrained bone sideways instead. There could be a lot of useful tools buried in these $%:spin: *&
& bone roll anglesā¦
Hey Orinoco, good job there. This post is obviously late, but yes, roll settings arenāt permanent. Iāve found thru many experiments that only workaround is to be sure all your chains are aligned at least to Y, X or Z global axis (scaling them to chain root location using cursor as reference is a good way to do it).
For instance all my biped rigs have horizontal arms (in front view) and perfectly vertical legs (in front view). Any bone that lacks at least one of these alignments will change its roll sooner or later (try going in/out edit mode and do CTRL+N everytimeā¦ I always get different rolls).
BTW, at Plumiferos we coded a hack to ālockā the roll so those bones you know are problematic can keep their rolls with a CTRL+N command.
Regards
