The old copy menu script got some love lately, works fine in beta 2.54, solves some bugs, gets pep8 compliant and its own wiki page:
It has a few options not available from the buttons (e.g. copying pose bone visual transforms) and provides the comforts of 2.4ish interaction 😉
Quick edit: the script is now in trunk and contains edit mode functionality, updated the url accordingly…
Just a small utility I’ve been using to make my life easier, a little addon that lets you assign names to layers in an armature and hide/unhide them in the 3D View Properties area. Download it here, unpack then install via the add-ons area in user preferences. Works on current SVN (and the soon-to-come beta hopefully)
There’s also a ‘hidden’ operator you can use in the 3d view (search for change bone name layer) that allows you to switch selected bones to a named layer. It’s a bit rough, but the panel at least beats having to hunt and peck one of those 32 nondescript little buttons 🙂
This isn’t really part of the gilgamesh rig, just a utility I’ve been using while rigging. The final UI (you can see a peak of it just under the layers in the screenie) has hardcoded layer names, and only those that are relevant to animation.
Our intrepid intern Henri recently returned home to finish his studies. At the ritual farewell farmstand ice cream, he instinctively adopted the posture of all Frenchmen bearing gifts to this country. I’m happy my return from Tosmi allowed one day of overlap before his departure. With any luck we’ll meet again soon at Blender conference or elsewhere. I hope he stays on the project from home in his spare time. Henri, roller derby just won’t be the same without you 🙁
Hi folks,
Tube will be on slight slowdown the next couple of weeks, as the local team goes on various hiatus(es? ii? hmmm) . I’ll be in Sofia Bulgaria, teaching with some standup talented Blenderheads at TOSMI (Training in Open Source Multimedia Instruments – in a word: Blender) sponsered/ ran by interspace.
Becky is taking a week break from drawing- right now we’re four shots short of our summer goal of finishing a draft of the new animatic- and visiting friends in NYC. Fateh, Josh and Henri are vacationing in Boston, Block Island, and NYC for a few days, then back to the studio.
I’ll be still working on Tube part time, via IRC , email and Helga. Expect some rigging goodies soon!
Time to Rig
Our character concept art has been finaled for a while (expect a post with pretty pictures soon). All I really need to know is where the joints and outlines are, which I can get from the concepts, so it is at least a good time to begin rigging.
My last production character rigs have all been in Blender 2.4x, examples can be seen online in the Mancandy rig and the rigs I did for CNIPA ( Suzanne Award winning entry by Spark Digital Entertainment). These rigs are ‘old’- there’s been progress/new ideas in the world of rigging, and Blender 2.5 is designed to enable (some) of these techniques.
Research
For research I studied two great blender rigs: Sintel by Nathan Vegdahl and Blenrig by Juan Pablo Bouza. I also looked at the features of Anzovin Setup machine rig for Maya, and had a great time looking at rigging PDFs, books, and demoreels. The basics are all the same it seems, but some features I had considered ‘optional’ are now ‘required’, and I found some awesome hints for more realism/detail in rigging, such as proceduralism, skin sliding and more. As I implement some of these I’ll blog the techniques.
Jarred and I conducted some rigging and python experiments, such as Pivot Switching, space Switching, twisting Spline IK, Mouth rigging, and more. I also made the copy menu addon for Blender because copying visual transformations was a good step in automating rigs, and taught me about the various available transformation matrixes for Blender bones.
Dan Finnegan, a previous Maya user, learned enough Blender to do cloth simulation tests in controlled situations. As a result we are quite nervous about using Blender’s cloth in production! We’ll opt probably for a rigged solution, or a cloth solution that only does part of the work and requires rigging for the rest. Our cloth requirements are quite extensive based on the concept, but not as bad as some of our early clothing designs. Thanks to work done by the team at project durian, we can at least use cloth sims in linked characters.
Results
I had great help from JPBouza, who customized a Blenrig model and rig to Gilgamesh proportions from the Zepam mesh – after deliberation, I will do a from scratch rig for our main character, while borrowing some features from this rig, the most important in my opinion is the awesome mesh deformation cage he has made that gets excellent results, which he adapted to Gilga’s proportions, so I’ll probably use that with no modification. I’ve got a list of ‘must have’ features, a good idea of how the overall rig should look like, and a list of ‘nice to have’ features. Some ‘advanced’ techniques are surprisingly easy to do, while some (ahem, skin sliding) will take more work to find workable.
Requirements
We need to start animation in September, so the first thing is deadlines: we need the main body controls locked down by then. No time to wait for a final character model, so I work on a proxy I made for rigging.
A small list of needed features on the very basic proxy:
This is not the final list, is enough to get animation started, but not finaled. More features will happen, some on the proxy, some after we get the final character model done, such as:
Progress
We’ve got the basic FK controls for the Torso, IK and FK for the arms and legs, Auto shoulder rotation tweakable, IK FK blending working on arms and legs, seamless (no jump) blending working 90% on the arms (both ways) and working on the legs going from IK to FK. An initial control UI exists, ready for tweaks, and we have rigamarule ported to 2.5, lacking only nice UI so we can start tagging bones (Thanks Daf and Josh)