[C5] Rigging and Skinning : bones and setup

[tonytrout]

Thanks Thomas for this comprehensive tutorial otherwise I would still be bumping aaround in the dark, also cckens tips for animating eyes, come at just the right time for me . Much appreciated

[Thomas]

when I'll have a little time, I'll do a tutorial for the eyes (not too hard, but you need to know a trick

[mon_stdnt]

is their a way to rig a robot character without distorting the joints(knee and elbows)?

[Thomas]

For a robot, you only have to link your robots parts to the bones, not attach them (to avoid the deformations)
But you may not need to do that. Only do a hierarchy with your bones and create the IK like this.

[mon_stdnt]

I know you don't mean to drag just the father bone (fisrt bone) to the figure.

In the attachment it shows what I'm going to drag. The neck bones to the figures neck. But when I do that the bones become 100% of their size and can't reduce it. And the other bone thats attached to the neck goes all the way up.

Does this set-up has to be done with out contraints, so it could be resize and moveable?

thanx for your patience and for setting time to help me out of your busy schedule.

[Thomas]

No, you need to drag the 3D mesh to the bone in the scene tree. Like this, it will create the link between them.

[Erklaerbar]

many thanks for the great tutorial. I just created my first rigged character. But now i cant just figure out how to save it (or duplicate it) without the need to redo all weighting. Hmm noobish question i guess, but how can i save out the completely rigged character for further import into other scenes ?


Many thanks for any hint!

[mon_stdnt]

Erklaerbar: you just answer your own question. Save the rigged bones (.car) and then imported to any scene your working own.

Thomas: Sorry, but I still don't get it. I attach a .car file of JUST one of the robot's leg, to see if you can show me. I want to do the rest so for myself,so I can learn.

many thanx

[Noviski]

That's amazing! How easy is make a walkcycle with this setup! Thanks, Thomas!

[Thomas]

Well, I'm glad it helped you!

[JuST]

I have a problem with the animation of my "violetta" character. Her hair is done by using a hundret or more strands with a hairtexture. I grouped them, moved the group into the charactergroup and attached the bones of this char to the whole group. Till then no probs appear. But when I try to adjust the wheight or the bones influences, I have to edit every single hairstrand... Do I have to attach them to each other before attaching the bones?

[Jaxon]

I just want to say Hello to Polyloop and thanks to Thomas for this
wonderful tut. It is just what I needed.

[yan]

Hi everyone! Very cool tutorial!

But I have a problem...

I tried to make a snake-like character with movable eyes: So it's simple for the bones (1 chain, from the tip of the tail to the base of the head). I set up the eyes with constraints and "point at" modifier, and I works great, but as soon as I attach the bones to the body of the snake, the eyes cannot be controled anymore (nor rotated or scaled manually).

My question is: does anyone know how to setup a bone structure (so the character can perform like the one in the tutorial) and still be able to control individual parts of the character, like the eyes?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Thomas]

attache the eyes after attaching the bones.
If you do that before, then, the eyes will be concidered as bones, then, the modifier won't work anymore.

[JuST]

So how do you animate hair? It has to follow the head and the headbone, but I don't want to set the weight and influence for every single hairstrand. So do I have to attach them to each other? Doesn't this destroy the mapping?
Or do I just have to move the hair later into the group as the eyes?
How do you Pros handle this problem?

[Thomas]

only link them after attaching the bones to the mesh. By linking, I mean select the object to attach in the scene tree and drag and drop it on its new parent.

[yan]

Thank's Thomas!

No it works beautifully!

Hope I can post something soon...

Well... after a few hours of rendering I guess...........

[JuST]

Thank you Thomas. Now I understood and now it works fine for me, too!

[chris's_creation]

i am about to test it
thanks

[three3dguy]

Hi Thomas,..

Hopefully i'm somewhat clear explaining this to you, my problem is I did a import lightwave object file into (carrara pro 6) and it have many parts in this object file. SO when I do a click onto the root of that particular object file i'm am transfer to the modeling room but with out the object file. There nothing showing up in the modeling room to work with.

Now I did click into the parent sub tree of the many parts from the (lwo) object file and I was successfully able to go into the modeling room and do a convert to vertex for each separate individual part in the sub tree but that not allowing me to use the weight paint function or setup the model properly. Also the weight paint is in a disable mode because there only a sub part of the parent in the modeling room.

SO is there someway to compile all those sub-part of that (lwo) object file down to a single master into one object file?