Concerning the soulder... well I will think about it. What I like about the current setup is that it might be very usefull to conteract shoulder deformation if skinned to the mesh. But I agree it is a strange setup... however it is the one implemented in Blender's meta-rig.
Alternatives would be a sort of targetless IK setup like explained in the Mancandy FAQ videos... but that is not really functional IK and thus can not be used to animate holding a weapon well. Of course we could also set it up as the legs, but even though that sounds somewhat logical, I have never seen a rig doing it like that (for what ever reason).
Any hints on setting up the constrains you mentioned? As you can tell this is my first experience with an advance rig, before a simple IK chain was already rocket science for my rigs ;)
Ok updated the rig again with a hand rig according to the tutorial you posted. It's still a bit uncomfortable to use without the widgets, but I will add those in the end.
Otherwise... I removed the lowest spine bone (seemed sufficient to have the pelvis), added a central "body" bone (not sure if needed) to move the entire rig, and added some "shoulder blade" bones... I hope that is what you ment with your shoulder remark.
I think the hand has a target... the bigger bone around the hand bone... maybe I should rename that.
You might have convinced me regarding the copy-rot. rig... (but again will add this in the end). However I am a bit confused about the GPU skinning. I am well aware that (especially on older hardware) you have only a limited number of bones that are "for free/hardware accelerated", but does that really concern us much in this case? AFAIK the exporter from Blender just exports the skinned bones, so if we have helpers as parents or childs those would never show up in the binary file and thus would also never be rendered in the GPU right? So as long as the number of skinned bones is low enough, how should the rest of the rig be of any concern?
That is awesome... how long did it take to create this? You seem to be a one-man game dev monster ;) Pushing out one high quality thing after another in an very short timeframe.
Na I wouldn't call this even close to done... this isn't supposed to be a quick rig, but a all bells and whisles first choice for humanoid game models ;)
Concerning the palm bones... well they offer a nice way to strech the hands and if you just don't skin them they are simple helper bones that never show up in the exported model. But I am planning to make that more clear by putting all the helper bones on a seperate layer. Maybe some widgets would be nice after all, so that one can hide all the helper bones...
Concerning the shoulders... well make a suggestion. I am really unsure how to set them up. Right now there is this "upper shoulder bone", which I think prevents the shoulder from deforming strangely. But I am not sure if that is the best solution.
The pelvis bone is there for better "hip-swing" animation, which I think is a pretty usefull feature, especially for female models ;) Could you elaborate in more detail what you mean with your comment regarding the disconnected pelvis bone? I currently don't see what the problem is there.
Regarding the foot tumble... well maybe I will still include this... but it's a really rarely used motion that can be done FK also. Besides... modern engines have a foot snapping system that does align the foot with the ground automatically thus doing most of the work where a tumble might be used.
What is further needed to rig the hand? It is already working fine... just some wigets and maybe some "action constraits" for typical movements would be nice... a FK switch would be indeed nice... I have seen that in a nother rig... but how do you actually make one? Got a tutorial on that?
Other remarks:
I am really unsure if a seperated copy rotation rig is really needed... the way the rig is set up, the main hiracy is exactly what you would want for skinning. So unless we significantly change that I don't really see the need for that (and it might just confuse the users). I think one of the main reasons such a setup is used in professional environments is that thus the modlers and skinners can already work on their parts while the riggers and animators might still be refining things on the main rig. Thus this way no time is lost waiting for the final version of the rig. In this case however the rig will be final before used as an asset, so I don't really see the need. But I would be happy if someone else would give some additional ideas why it might be worthwhile to make a copy-rot rig.
I am also thinking about creating a custom bone psydo mesh, like the did with the tarsal bone in the tutorial... there are several very nice rigs doing that (Alex's horse rig on this website for example), but I fear my current pc might be to slow to work with that than... and other that looking nice, I can't see the actual benefit right now. But maybe there is some other reason why it would be nice to have something like that?
But once this rig has reached a "final" state we really need to start making a animation preset. Is anyone around who has some previous animation experience? Mine is very limited to be honest.
Ok I found out what the reason for that strange shoulder bone is:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Animation/Armatures/BSoD...
Given that I think will switch to an elbow target design.
Very nice... I guess it's one of the best and probably most usefull pices of art here on OGA ;)
Ok, then we definitly need a copy-rot. rig.
Concerning the soulder... well I will think about it. What I like about the current setup is that it might be very usefull to conteract shoulder deformation if skinned to the mesh. But I agree it is a strange setup... however it is the one implemented in Blender's meta-rig.
Alternatives would be a sort of targetless IK setup like explained in the Mancandy FAQ videos... but that is not really functional IK and thus can not be used to animate holding a weapon well. Of course we could also set it up as the legs, but even though that sounds somewhat logical, I have never seen a rig doing it like that (for what ever reason).
Any hints on setting up the constrains you mentioned? As you can tell this is my first experience with an advance rig, before a simple IK chain was already rocket science for my rigs ;)
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=202260&p=1737552#post17...
Maybe something comes out of that too ;)
Ok updated the rig again with a hand rig according to the tutorial you posted. It's still a bit uncomfortable to use without the widgets, but I will add those in the end.
Otherwise... I removed the lowest spine bone (seemed sufficient to have the pelvis), added a central "body" bone (not sure if needed) to move the entire rig, and added some "shoulder blade" bones... I hope that is what you ment with your shoulder remark.
I think the hand has a target... the bigger bone around the hand bone... maybe I should rename that.
You might have convinced me regarding the copy-rot. rig... (but again will add this in the end). However I am a bit confused about the GPU skinning. I am well aware that (especially on older hardware) you have only a limited number of bones that are "for free/hardware accelerated", but does that really concern us much in this case? AFAIK the exporter from Blender just exports the skinned bones, so if we have helpers as parents or childs those would never show up in the binary file and thus would also never be rendered in the GPU right? So as long as the number of skinned bones is low enough, how should the rest of the rig be of any concern?
Any more ideas or improvments?
Updated the rig with a better foot (v2) and hand (v3)
That is awesome... how long did it take to create this? You seem to be a one-man game dev monster ;) Pushing out one high quality thing after another in an very short timeframe.
Na I wouldn't call this even close to done... this isn't supposed to be a quick rig, but a all bells and whisles first choice for humanoid game models ;)
Concerning the palm bones... well they offer a nice way to strech the hands and if you just don't skin them they are simple helper bones that never show up in the exported model. But I am planning to make that more clear by putting all the helper bones on a seperate layer. Maybe some widgets would be nice after all, so that one can hide all the helper bones...
Concerning the shoulders... well make a suggestion. I am really unsure how to set them up. Right now there is this "upper shoulder bone", which I think prevents the shoulder from deforming strangely. But I am not sure if that is the best solution.
The pelvis bone is there for better "hip-swing" animation, which I think is a pretty usefull feature, especially for female models ;) Could you elaborate in more detail what you mean with your comment regarding the disconnected pelvis bone? I currently don't see what the problem is there.
Regarding the foot tumble... well maybe I will still include this... but it's a really rarely used motion that can be done FK also. Besides... modern engines have a foot snapping system that does align the foot with the ground automatically thus doing most of the work where a tumble might be used.
What is further needed to rig the hand? It is already working fine... just some wigets and maybe some "action constraits" for typical movements would be nice... a FK switch would be indeed nice... I have seen that in a nother rig... but how do you actually make one? Got a tutorial on that?
Other remarks:
I am really unsure if a seperated copy rotation rig is really needed... the way the rig is set up, the main hiracy is exactly what you would want for skinning. So unless we significantly change that I don't really see the need for that (and it might just confuse the users). I think one of the main reasons such a setup is used in professional environments is that thus the modlers and skinners can already work on their parts while the riggers and animators might still be refining things on the main rig. Thus this way no time is lost waiting for the final version of the rig. In this case however the rig will be final before used as an asset, so I don't really see the need. But I would be happy if someone else would give some additional ideas why it might be worthwhile to make a copy-rot rig.
I am also thinking about creating a custom bone psydo mesh, like the did with the tarsal bone in the tutorial... there are several very nice rigs doing that (Alex's horse rig on this website for example), but I fear my current pc might be to slow to work with that than... and other that looking nice, I can't see the actual benefit right now. But maybe there is some other reason why it would be nice to have something like that?
But once this rig has reached a "final" state we really need to start making a animation preset. Is anyone around who has some previous animation experience? Mine is very limited to be honest.
Updated the rig with a better foot:
http://opengameart.org/content/blender25-humanoid-rig
I left out the widgets and the foot tumble control, since that seemed unnecessary and also slowed down my pc too much ;)
Should be now much more walk cycle friendly.
What he ment is that you click on the users name in the forum and have an option in the profile to see all the art he or she has submitted.
I think this has been suggested before and would definitly be very useful.
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