The end of this week should see the initial rig in the hands of animators, and I need a quick intro video to show them what’s in store. I whipped up a quick screencap of (most) of what we have so far. The rig is far from complete – I won’t do fingers and face until the model is finaled, too much can change in those small details. The rig itself is quite ‘smart’ as Rigamarule has been ported by myself, Daf and Josh to Blender 2.5. As a result, moving a joint can auto-update the rig easily, and I can add bones and then ‘place’ them using rules rather than manual transforms. More on that later, onwards to the actual features for animators.
I’ve hopped on the 2.5 rig-ui-in-the-view3D-properties-region bandwagon so popular among Blender riggers these days, though more could be done there.
Nice things that 2.5 enabled is seamless Pivot switching (via Python, rather than the constraint), and not shown in this video, seamless IK/FK switching (without jumping), better drivers, and myriad small features. I’m still waffling on exactly how certain features will look/feel/work, so this is a work in progress, but it should stabilize by Wednesday (time for animation tests)
On to the video:

For a higher resolution version, download this file.

  1. (bread out until there’s no hair in my longs) 🙁
    Well! If you let us reverse engineering it one day, I think I’ll be able to learn yet another verse of rigging.
    Dam, now that I had fully understood Mancandy…
    😛 It really looks like any animator best dream! 🙂

  2. Lluc :

    Awsome rig! Great project!

    How you make iK fK switch and no lost de rotation?

    Thanks!

  3. Lyle Walsh :

    I can’t seem to get the video to play, is there another link perhaps?

  4. Lyle what browser / OS ? there should be an mp4 html5 video and a flash player fall back, but I haven’t tested either (I’m using firefox on linux which defaults to the ogg video). It’s possible the mp4 won’t play on non-linux machines (mp4 is actually highly *un*portable due to too many options that are not supported on every decoder)
    You could also try the download link, and get the codecs for your OS ( http://www.xiph.org/downloads/ ) and check out the 3rd party downloads for windows and mac.

  5. blenderificus :

    great demo video of the AWESOME rig. do you ever plan on sharing the blend publicly?

  6. also: nice music. what’s that?

  7. Well, since this is an open movie, this file (or rather the final rig) will be on the DVD.
    Until then I probably won’t release the file, since it is wip and it will be too much work to support rig fixes.

  8. jfml The music is by “fruitcake hotel” an artist who shares work on freesound.
    You can see the url and the name on the end of the video. It is nice!

  9. tom :

    i have been searching your website for 2 days and can not find a man candy rig for blender 2.49 i would apreciate it if you told me how because all i see are videos and so could you please just give it to me because i can not find it

    cheers

  10. Hey Tom, sorry about that, our web-stuff is going through a bit of a shuffle, the mancandy stuff will be more easy to get soon.
    I’ll get you a download link, watch this space.
    Cheers
    Bassam

  11. […] Kurdalis’ demo of the rigging for tube, as well as the LOD scripts they have been working on for keeping the poly counts of their […]

  12. Unhurdof :

    Hi Bassam. Your character design and rig are beautiful. Gilgamesh sort of feels like Aeon Flux, which is very cool.

    Is there an expected release date for Tube?
    Can we expect a Gilgamesh FAQ DVD like Mancandy’s?

    I wasn’t using Blender when you made the Mancandy FAQ, but if you have one for your Tube characters coming soon, I’d like to pre-order it if possible. Thanks

  13. Hi Unhurdof. Thanks for your compliments. Aeon is the coolness — I think of it as the lovechild of Egon Schiele and the Codex Seraphinianus. I have a nice fat book of Schiele that Bassam often keeps with him as inspiration; it was always knocking around the studio during Elephants Dream. So it’s fair to say there is an affinity, for sure.

    The movie is going to be partly financed by pre-sales. As we gear up for production, I am getting ready to make a proper announcement. We are thinking to possibly release the rig in advance as one of the perks to those who pre-order. Production time will depend somewhat on funding. If we can eliminate the need to take side-work and get the budget to support greater chunks of time from our crew, we should finish next summer. -F

  14. blenderman :

    Hi. I have recently written a script to have some similar features as your rig. The last thing that I am missing is the IK/FK seamless switching. I have tried many different things and can’t seem to figure it out. If you could help me that would be great, thanks.

  15. Hi Blenderman. Some quick hints:
    – how you do it depend mainly on your setup i.e. how you did the ik/fk switch , which bone / controls you use, etc.
    – it mainly involves copying visual location and rotation to the IK or FK targets before the switch
    – the code for copying vis loc and rotation (and scale) is in the copy attributes menu addon (it’s in trunk)
    – you may have to do something more mathematically challenging for tricky setups (e.g. reverse foot locks, funky arm setups, etc.)

  16. SPIRIT :

    WOW! it will be great if you release this rigamarule script with a good explaining tutorials about how it works and how we can expand it with a self-made scripts! plus a series of awesome tutorials about rigging in 2.5 will be nice! I will look up for these kinda things! Peace!

  17. thanks spirit! we do plan on releasing *everything* under gpl (code) or creative commons (movies/blend files/images)
    As for tutorials, yes there are plans to do those too!
    Currently the system is not at it’s first ‘release’ ready state, in otherwise, both the rig and rigamarule are what I would call alpha. By the end of the movie, with the testing of production, we’ll be at release level.

  18. Armin :

    Hi, can you tell me how you ik torso and ik head is setup, I have not seen this on other blender rigs.

  19. well, it is not that complicated, there are the geo chain, which copies transforms from either an FK control chain (with optional isolation) or an IK control chain, with properties driving the switch. In addition, with the tube rig you get a checkbox style seamless switch.

  20. Armin :

    Sorry me again, can you post screen shot of IK torso only bones, I am trying to rig something like that but I want one more control in the middle like allot of maya rigs have on IK-spine.

    I have rigged something that is like yours but without IK, I used b-bone and stretch-to so I can get nice S curve but I want extra control in the middle of the spine.

©URCHIN 2015