Looks pretty good to me. Maybe I will add a small farward and backward rotation constrain to the shoulder so that is doesn't move quite as much forward... but it is really only a little too much I think.
About the spine IK, well you might be right, it does act a bit flakey. It is really nice that the torso follows the neck this way however, turned out to be useful in the pose above (which took only a few seconds to make).
But you are right the elbow target was messed up... I think by parenting it to the shoulder instead I pretty much fixed that. Have a look at v4.2 I just uploaded.
I also experimented with a IK controller for the spine in that version. I think it might be quite handy to position the head, and since it is targetless you can still FK controll the individual bones.
The main question I have now is though... will it work for animation too? I read a lot of times that certain IK setups work fine for posing a model but break apart when actually animating it. Does anyone have further insight into that?
He? I can't aprehend what you just wrote... With the current setup the shoulder does not move much unless the arm moves above the head. But small subtile movement can make a big difference.
I don't see the need for a rot-limt of the upper arm at all, could you explain further?
Hmm... it's not like the rig doesn't have FK... it's just that I don't see a really good reason why it should have complete FK control via a switch. But you are right that the copy-rot. rig we are planning to do anyways could be used for that (unless the copy-rot. contrain interferes). But I will have a look at the tuts for sure.
Oh and I made a small update to the rig... limit rot. is working after all on the shoulder bone, I was just stupid and tested it with 100% IK weight. Now it limits the movement of the shoulder downwards a bit and also minimized the edit/pose mode snapping.
I think the current shoulder setup is pretty neat... but of course I know little about animating. It just seems too simple of a solution... and I wonder why it was absolutly impossible to find a good reference rig with an automatic shoulder. Maybe I am just a genius :p
@Lamoot: Yes, animations. But who knows when this will actually happen. I am still hopeing that a skilled animator shows up and just quickly does it... since I have never done walkcycles etc before... so it will be a slow progress (but hey great learning experience :-/ ).
@adrix89: You think so? If I move my arm around the shoulder always moves with it a bit. Especially when lifting the arm above the shoulder joint all the movement comes from the shoulderblade. I tried to limit the movement if arm movement is below the joint however... but somehow the IK and Target contraints override the limit rotation ones :( But with the low influence (.2) it has right now it seems to be ok... maybe the shoulder movement is a bit exagertated now... but real actors also do that to give their performance more life ;)
Concering the FK-IK switch... it seems to me that that is a lot of effort to set up (additional set of FK bones etc) while giving very little benefit (in fact all the movement can be done with IK, it might just be a bit more comfortable to do certain movements with FK). But maybe I will lower the influence of a few IK controlers a bit, like I did with the hand to allow for some fine tuning with FK. But feel free to correct me on that stance... I might be overlooking something where FK is actually needed.
GTK Radiant is still a pretty good tool (same goes for the many available forks, netradiant, darkradiant, zeroradiant etc.), back in the days when I was still modding (~1999-2001), it was superior to the unreal editor, but this has probably changed by now. I think the radiant was actually not significantly changed since then at all ;)
Still it's the best open-source level editing tool currently out there... the Cube2 editor is probably fine when using that engine... it feels somewhat limited due to it's 1st person view mode however.
There is also Quark http://quark.sourceforge.net/ but that is now officially a dead project, and was never that good anyways (+ Windows only).
The CAFU engine also seems to have it's own custom editor, so maybe that is worth looking into:
@adrix89: I really want to have an automatic setup that moves the shoulder according to the arm movement... that really adds a lot to character animation to have some realistic shoulder movement. First I tried it with a follow target constrain, but the IK does the job much better. But I am open for other suggestions.
@Lamoot: I am aware of that, but unless they make it really fexible so that all sort of strange multipedal rigs can be made I don't really see the point. Once you have a nice rig for a regular human it is very easy and quick to adjust it to the proportions of the individual models.
In any case making this rig is really just a mean to an end, what I really want to have/create is a "plug-in" human animations set for all sorts of games (many FPS for now though). That is what is really lacking in open-source game development (and one of the main reasons people stick to modding games like Half-Life, where such a thing exists). That riggify system is really of no need or use regarding that.
Changed to pole target IK both the fingers (simplified but same functionality) and the arms (still a bit strange in movement, not exactly sure why).
Also tried to have a shoulder that follows the arm a bit... tried to find any good infomation on how to set up a shoulder, but either there was simply a FK setup or a hugly complex 50 bones containing super rig... seemed impossible to find a nice but simple setup. This way it somewhat works, but I really don't like that the IK snapping between edit and pose mode is that big.
Also made it possible to move the hand a bit by FK, by lowering the copy-rot. contraint to .8 influence.
http://imgur.com/lBsjN.jpg
Looks pretty good to me. Maybe I will add a small farward and backward rotation constrain to the shoulder so that is doesn't move quite as much forward... but it is really only a little too much I think.
About the spine IK, well you might be right, it does act a bit flakey. It is really nice that the torso follows the neck this way however, turned out to be useful in the pose above (which took only a few seconds to make).
I like the IK and the shoulder as it is ;)
But you are right the elbow target was messed up... I think by parenting it to the shoulder instead I pretty much fixed that. Have a look at v4.2 I just uploaded.
I also experimented with a IK controller for the spine in that version. I think it might be quite handy to position the head, and since it is targetless you can still FK controll the individual bones.
The main question I have now is though... will it work for animation too? I read a lot of times that certain IK setups work fine for posing a model but break apart when actually animating it. Does anyone have further insight into that?
He? I can't aprehend what you just wrote... With the current setup the shoulder does not move much unless the arm moves above the head. But small subtile movement can make a big difference.
I don't see the need for a rot-limt of the upper arm at all, could you explain further?
The last bit doesn't make sense to me at all :-/
What you describe sounds like Terragen:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/
that is not open-source however.
Hmm... it's not like the rig doesn't have FK... it's just that I don't see a really good reason why it should have complete FK control via a switch. But you are right that the copy-rot. rig we are planning to do anyways could be used for that (unless the copy-rot. contrain interferes). But I will have a look at the tuts for sure.
Oh and I made a small update to the rig... limit rot. is working after all on the shoulder bone, I was just stupid and tested it with 100% IK weight. Now it limits the movement of the shoulder downwards a bit and also minimized the edit/pose mode snapping.
I think the current shoulder setup is pretty neat... but of course I know little about animating. It just seems too simple of a solution... and I wonder why it was absolutly impossible to find a good reference rig with an automatic shoulder. Maybe I am just a genius :p
@Lamoot: Yes, animations. But who knows when this will actually happen. I am still hopeing that a skilled animator shows up and just quickly does it... since I have never done walkcycles etc before... so it will be a slow progress (but hey great learning experience :-/ ).
@adrix89: You think so? If I move my arm around the shoulder always moves with it a bit. Especially when lifting the arm above the shoulder joint all the movement comes from the shoulderblade. I tried to limit the movement if arm movement is below the joint however... but somehow the IK and Target contraints override the limit rotation ones :( But with the low influence (.2) it has right now it seems to be ok... maybe the shoulder movement is a bit exagertated now... but real actors also do that to give their performance more life ;)
Concering the FK-IK switch... it seems to me that that is a lot of effort to set up (additional set of FK bones etc) while giving very little benefit (in fact all the movement can be done with IK, it might just be a bit more comfortable to do certain movements with FK). But maybe I will lower the influence of a few IK controlers a bit, like I did with the hand to allow for some fine tuning with FK. But feel free to correct me on that stance... I might be overlooking something where FK is actually needed.
GTK Radiant is still a pretty good tool (same goes for the many available forks, netradiant, darkradiant, zeroradiant etc.), back in the days when I was still modding (~1999-2001), it was superior to the unreal editor, but this has probably changed by now. I think the radiant was actually not significantly changed since then at all ;)
Still it's the best open-source level editing tool currently out there... the Cube2 editor is probably fine when using that engine... it feels somewhat limited due to it's 1st person view mode however.
There is also Quark http://quark.sourceforge.net/ but that is now officially a dead project, and was never that good anyways (+ Windows only).
The CAFU engine also seems to have it's own custom editor, so maybe that is worth looking into:
http://www.cafu.de/
@adrix89: I really want to have an automatic setup that moves the shoulder according to the arm movement... that really adds a lot to character animation to have some realistic shoulder movement. First I tried it with a follow target constrain, but the IK does the job much better. But I am open for other suggestions.
@Lamoot: I am aware of that, but unless they make it really fexible so that all sort of strange multipedal rigs can be made I don't really see the point. Once you have a nice rig for a regular human it is very easy and quick to adjust it to the proportions of the individual models.
In any case making this rig is really just a mean to an end, what I really want to have/create is a "plug-in" human animations set for all sorts of games (many FPS for now though). That is what is really lacking in open-source game development (and one of the main reasons people stick to modding games like Half-Life, where such a thing exists). That riggify system is really of no need or use regarding that.
Updated the arm and shoulder rig
http://opengameart.org/content/blender25-humanoid-rig
Updated it again.
Changed to pole target IK both the fingers (simplified but same functionality) and the arms (still a bit strange in movement, not exactly sure why).
Also tried to have a shoulder that follows the arm a bit... tried to find any good infomation on how to set up a shoulder, but either there was simply a FK setup or a hugly complex 50 bones containing super rig... seemed impossible to find a nice but simple setup. This way it somewhat works, but I really don't like that the IK snapping between edit and pose mode is that big.
Also made it possible to move the hand a bit by FK, by lowering the copy-rot. contraint to .8 influence.
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