You're not going to stop posting are you?

---

Heck no... I'm not going anywhere.. Just shifting gears... I've spent a lot of time modeling, VRay and Particle Flow... Time to get more well rounded.

---

Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

Stab it to the floor man! You don't need Luck.

Can't wait to see some stuff.

---

Chris

Thanks Chris.

---

Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

Have fun man, I have started to learn rigging like 5 times. And given up.

---

Please support us and post a [Link to www.digitalartsfront.com] on your website.

--Matt

I hope to come out of it with something..lol

---

Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

I think it's a good skill to learn. If you can make a good character rig it sets you apart from the crowd in an employment situation because it's not something that a lot of people are great at. This is probably due to the fact that it's not as enjoyable or creative as some other aspects of 3d, but if you're technically minded you can get a lot out of it. It's a good problem solving skill.

---

[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

My biggest this was always getting envelopes correct.

---

Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

There are a few things I would like to learn about. For example, do you remember using wire parameters to control your model? I heard that 3dsmax has better tools than that, in its newer version. But I never found out what.

---

I'm learning right now, how to use orientation constraints to control the hips, spine and head. Then I will have to learn some scripting for creating custom sliders to control hands and feet. This could take a while.

---

Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

I've been doing a fair bit of parameter wiring lately, hopefully I'll have something to show for it in the next few weeks. It could stand to have a few improvements, I hope you're right Issac. Rick, you don't have to learn scripting to create custom controls ( though it's probably a good thing to learn), you can just use max sliders (under helpers/manipulators) and ire your parameters to them.

---

[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

The rig I usually build when I have time to make a custom rig has these things.

1. Ik arms and legs with controllers on the joints wired (or with expression controllers) to the swivel angle parameter in the IK solver.

2. two main body controls one to move the whole upper body including the hands and one where the hands stick. (ie: one with the ik targets linked and one without)

3. on the hands there are palm controllers The IK targets are position constrained to the control objects and the palm bones are orientation constrained to the controllers.

4. The foot has a slightly confusing four part linking setup which allows the foot to roll. I can explain that in detail if you want but basically it allows you to see the transform keys in the timeline rather than having seperate sliders appearing as modifier keyframes.

5. sometimes spline Ik on the spine looks good but usually just two or three spine bones in FK are fine.

I think thats it, morpher for the face, for teeth and gums I'd have a seperate object with morph targets that match the main head and wire them together.

For skinning I usually use a mixture of hand weighting vertices and some envelopes and if I really want a polished skinning I'd mess with skin morph to get the tricky bits working properly.

---

I've never hand weighted vertices, is it time consuming?

---

[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

yeah, not much fun at all. basically with the weight tool in the skin modifier there are several shortcuts to speed things up. you can select rings and loops and weight selections with preset buttons like .1 through to 1.0 also painting weights can work quite well sometimes. you select the bone in question and then paint, then it kind of blends with the other weights around it.
Its almost compulsory to do some hand weighting unless its a very skinny character. I can never get a good skin job without at least hand weighting the groin area. That sounds pretty sick huh.

---

I'm not sure if I even want to comment on that one..lol

---

Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

I haven't done much character rigging but the ones I have done have generally been pretty skinny. Remember Norman Tyson?

---

[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

Yeah man Norman was great. I think I probably tried to steer people into making characters that were easy to rig in the interests of getting through all the modules without major headaches but I guess thats really what you have to consider for any project. character design should probably include a fair amount of thought on how you will eventually animate the character and if there is time to create a rig worthy of say a highly muscular guy. Its so frustrating when you have a nice model that is going to be a total pain in the arse to rig effectively. My moebius girl for example is proving to be a problem with all her dangly jewelery, clothing etc... The way I modelled her boots and legs required a re modelling job so everything flowed properly and I could actually skin her without it all folding into itself.

---

if your interested here a couple of rigging demo reels that will blow you away or intimidate the crap out of you or both.

[Link to www.youtube.com]
the first rig in this vid has so much stuff going on that it really is overwhelming, but it has everything i could ever ask for in a rig.

[Link to www.youtube.com]
and here is a transformers rig that changes from robot to car and then to helicopter all in one. very impressive.

---

and it's a story that might bore you, but you don't have to listen, because I always knew it was going to be like that.

Ok, i'm depressed now!

---

Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

Man that stuff is just insane. Its like looking into an abyss. I doubt I will ever understand rigging to even a quarter of that complexity. It would be fun to have a play with some of that stuff.
I'd like to read a tutorial on the arm and leg setups that guy had in the first video. I can live without all the stretchy stuff but solid IK/FK arms that dont twitch and go tricky would be nice.

---

are you talking about the IK/FK matching? Cause every Ik to FK switch i've ever used or made has had issues as it blends between the two, so matching would be awesome.

check out [Link to www.fahrenheitdigital.com] these rigging dvds. i've seen bits and pieces and they do go through some very technical stuff including the IK FK matching, but it was so technical and involved so much scripting that i just couldn't grasp it and gave up hehe. I actually do like rigging but only from an animators point of view.

---

and it's a story that might bore you, but you don't have to listen, because I always knew it was going to be like that.

well, I'm not really sure what this guy in your first video link has going on in his arm rig "non roll arm setup", "IK/Fk with auto snap" space switching etc... I got as far as setting up IK/FK blending for a characters arms but usually all my own rigs are just fairly basic stuff.
I've been using CAT for rigging several human characters, a horse and a wolf recently for work and it does the job in literally a few minutes but I'm not really that keen on how it all works when you get down to animating. I guess rigging is one of those areas Ive always found very interesting and wanted to get better at it but my mind isnt really wired for it. Those DVDs look like they would be a worthy purchase. I'll check it out.

---

What's wrong with the animating tools in CAT? I was looking forward to trying it at some stage, I've heard good things about it.

---

[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

Yeah it is good but I have found it to be a bit annoying recently. probably due to lack of understanding how it works more than anything but I find it frustrating. When you animate an arm in IK, Keys are set on all the bones in the arm so if you want to go and change keys around you need to remember to select the whole arm hierachy. Also in the version I have here you can't seem to select multiple keyframes in the timeline which means you cant drag copy chunks of animation unless you find it in trackview but that means you have to be very carefull when selecting tracks on multiple objects. theres several other things I can't think of right now but generally its ok. I guess its when you compare it to character studio that it becomes impressive. In CAT your animation does at least behave in a similar way to max standard keyframing. namely it has normal besier controllers on the position and rotation transform tracks which means you can edit curves in the same way as a normal max object. unlike character studio which has some bizarre quaternion/bezier method that creates some very annoying results. Its very fast to rig something up and you can save poses for hands and all that stuff so its usefull when you don't have time to make a custom rig.

---

Speaking of character animation plugins. Although you can now get CAT free if you are a MAX subscriber and the next version of max will most likely have it integrated into the software there is also this free rigging plugin called Puppet shop. It looks very similar to CAT but maybe its got something to offer. I'm going to have a play with it now. Seems its completely free so why not huh?.

[Link to www.lumonix.net]

---

Here is a character I put together to practice some rigging with.. I didn't want to attempt any hand rigging at this time. I'm going to focus on the spine, head, arms, legs and basic feet for now, until I get a good handle on it. I've include an image just to give you and idea of what I am working with.

---

---

Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

God luck, make sure you've got good topology if you want it to deform well.

---

[Link to www.3dprevis.com]