Doc talk:2.4/Tutorials/Animation/BSoD/Character Animation

Hi Ryan,

Nice project, and cute character :)

I'm only a novice rigger and animator but I noticed that if you try to have the character jump into the air, by translating the 'spine1 bone, his foot bones, get "left behind" and the legs stretch out, ... which might be desirable I supposed for a cartoony type effect. I suppose you can translate the spine1 until the legs are at max extension and then animate the 'master' bone, I honestly haven't tried that yet, so I don't really know if there is any problem in animating that way. I just think it's simpler to mainly use the spine1 bone for most animating and the master for only special circumstances (character lying down / falling ... ?others) .. What do you think?

I was wondering why you chose to setup the feet and legs IK the way that you did.

I did some experimenting and came up with a not too complex way to keep the feet together and stil have IK on the legs.

1)I made the toes, foot and lower_leg bones all connected, and changed the IK target for the lower leg from the "foot" bones, to the "leg.l/r" bones (I also renamed those to IKF.l / IKF.r).

2) I added a copy rotation constraint to the foot.l/r bones targeting the respective "leg.l/r" (IKF.l/r) bones

3) I aligned the IKF.l/r (leg.l/r) bones with the foot bones, and made sure the roll angles were zero in edit mode.

After doing that, when the spine1 bone is translated down, the feet stay in place and don't rotate (as they did with the original rig), but the foot bones also "come along for the ride) if the spine1 bone is translated upwards enough to straighten the legs and beyond.

I also moved the 'master' bone down in front of the character, and rotated the 'spine1' bone so that it sticks out behind him, making it easier to grab.

I was thinking of posting a mini-"update" tutorial on the wiki here, outlining the above steps I took.

Is your project finished? Do you plan on leaving the design as is?

Mike

--Mstram 21:00, 29 July 2006 (CEST)

Updates

Thanks for your comments, mstram.

The foot rig I generally use is Bassam's foot rig, and I definitely wanted to avoid that kind of complexity in this tutorial. I might have gone a little too far on the simple side though, purposely avoiding any kind of constraint except an IK Solver.

I tried out your suggestions, and the rig works well. I would add a two more steps in addition to the ones you gave, if spine1 is going to be spending a lot of time away from master:

• Parent the eyes bone to spine1
• Parent knee.l to leg.l and knee.r to leg.r

That said, please don't add anything yet to this tutorial. Although the deadline has passed, there's still a lot that we (the authors) need to work out with the BSoD mentors. Also, it would be too much work to redo the rig in the existing tutorial,since a lot of screenshots and text after the lower body rigging section would have to be changed.

I'm fully planning on making "upgrade" modules for this character in the future, but have to work out the best way to do so. If you want, start working on your User page on the wiki (maybe using the final .blend from this tutorial as a starting point) and then we'll migrate it over later.

-Ryan

--Marenzelleria 03:56, 29 July 2006 (CEST)

Problem ><

Hry great tutorial thus far but i got stuck on a part when i created the eye and placed it in place for some reason the mirror accepted itself and i cant edit the face mesh anymore i also cant see any vertices any idea why?

Demo video?

If there is a video showing the end product, it's hard to find. Any chance of a link right up front?

How 'bout Blender 2.5

Can you please update this tutorial to include 2.5, this is an awesome tut but I'd like to do it all over agin in 2.5 but I'm having a hard time "translating" the buttons n stuff. Just add little comments like "or in 2.5 the whatever option is found at this/that location" i am soooo stuck at the IK solver part :(...