Help with armature problem

[MadGypsy]

LOL! his rig is my rig. It's different by like 2 bones and his extra 2 bones are not necessary. I noticed he is also adjusting the entire foot, whereas mine automatically rotates on the ball.

I will download all 3 of his videos and jump through them at another time. Good find Bluntz. I'm sure I'll find something helpful in his videos that I didn't already know. I just don't have patience right now for this guy.

Google should make a video transcriber. That way people like me could get right to it and skip all the fluff and chatty parts.

over 8 minutes into the video and this guy still hasn't started making/explaining a rig. Actually he currently has a mirror on his mesh and for some reason he wont shut up about it.

[bluntz]

@MG
Yes,I chose it because you have the same methodology.
I am looking for another one that the guy builds his rig while in mirror mode so
the bones are identical and symmetrical from the get go but its hard to find the good stuff without some dumb ass music or an accent so thick its unusable.
I use download helper addon for firefox to grab the vids.I have several gigs on my Desktop at home but does nothing for me on the road,it does convert them to several formats as well..
@TM
Make sure you have the updated MD3 scr.It has even fixed the flap function so you can have cloth physics in MD3.Get with MG and make that Cthulu head with animated tenticles...

[MadGypsy]

Our methodology is damn near identical and I have never seen any of his tutorials. Ward taught me how to rig (mostly). What I didn't learn from Ward I figured out by just messing around with the results of his tutorials.

My current rig is actually a mix of 2 different Ward rigs expanded to include movement limits and upgraded with some better bone parenting. Wards rigs are pretty good but the results he ends his tutorials with are unfinished/kinda junky. I only say this because he leaves things hanging. Here is a perfect example.

In the blenderman rigging tutorial when he gets to the foot he sets the whole thing up to roll on the ball of the foot BUT he doesn't parent the heel bone to the ankle bone so, when you go to roll on the ball, the heel is left behind.

That's my only qualm with Ward's tuts There is always some simple and apparent forgotten step. If you are smart and pay attention, you can generally figure out the missed step in about 5 seconds. Noobs however, probably wouldn't even realized a step was missed and would just figure that unfinished junk is right.

edit: In Wards Octoberfest rigging tutorial he starts having problems with his own rig right from jump. The forearm is all sloppy and twisty. for me, the sloppy/twisty forearm was bone roll. For him, sloppy/twisty forearm was bad topology. I don't know about y'all but if I made a rig tutorial, I would rig my model before the video and check it out before I start teaching people how to do it.

Get with MG and make that Cthulu head with animated tenticles...

Why don't YOU get with MG ...err me and animate some testicles on the Cthulhu head. We're the "start with a vertex" people here. It really only makes perfect sense to team up on some model. With my 1 poly and your billions we are bound to make something really unique.

[bluntz]

@TM
Here is a good one for rigify in blender 2.7
@MG
I suggest you grab it too as some different tech is shown for roll control with great isolation.

[bluntz]

Why don't YOU get with MG ...err me and animate some testicles on the Cthulhu head. We're the "start with a vertex" people here. It really only makes perfect sense to team up on some model. With my 1 poly and your billions we are bound to make something really unique.

LMAO!
Sorry but Rook already beat me to animated testes
He used the flap modifier with MDL somehow and has a funtional flacid penus on his quakeguy,NO SHIT!
I wish I had the time to collaborate with ya but I am not much but a lurker nowadays.

[MadGypsy]

I know you aren't gonna believe me but, I wrote testicles by accident or maybe it was a Freudian slip or something.

You started talking about testes and I'm like "WTF is this dude talking about?!" then I read my quote and saw what I did

It sucks cause my accident was funnier than my actual joke (1 poly/billions)

I wish I had the time to collaborate with ya but I am not much but a lurker nowadays.

Well you obviously have some kind of time. You just posted like 2 hours of rig videos. I'm assuming you watched them.

[MadGypsy]

I just realized that I didn't know what Rigify was and maybe never even heard of it. When TeaMonster first brought up rigify, for some reason I was confusing it with blenrig. If anyone doesn't know, blenrig is a completed armature of epic mobility for humanoid shapes. I've never used it but, I've seen videos of it in use and it is quite impressive.

If I remember correctly though, It does not have a control rig, which in my opinion is just messy. Control rigs seem redundant until you hide all but ?8? bones to control the entire armature. If you spend the time to make bone shapes it's even nicer. Then you can hide all the bones and your controls are hollow meshes that you shaped to represent what it will control. I almost made bone shapes for my rig but I kinda like the very easy to see solid bones.

I use bbones so it's a little bit cleaner to look at than quaternion bones

[Tea Monster]

It does create a control rig, but a very detailed one more appropriate for animating a film.

I can't stand YouTube tuts for exactly that reason. Stop bitching about last night's Game of Thrones and get the hell on with it.

[Tea Monster]

A friend of mine is having problems with one of his rigs. Do any of you know how to mirror the constraints of the left hand over to the right hand? I've never messed with constraints (I'm sort of a stone-age rig kind of guy ) and I have feck all knowledge of how to fix it.

Animating writhing testicles on his head would definetley give the player a 'Lovecraftian moment' where the player 1. has to look twice to confirm what he is looking at and 2. starts to doubt their sanity after looking at it.

[MadGypsy]

Do any of you know how to mirror the constraints of the left hand over to the right hand?

How to build an entire rig with extra unescapable drama included

1) build the entire spine from hip to head
2) build the entire left hand side (characters left)
3) name all bones and append .L to the name of all left side bones
4) add all constraints to every necessary bone
5) open up view properties and set cursor coordinates to 0 (zero)
6) change object center from median point to cursor
7) duplicate (shift+d) and flip (sx-1) the entire left side
make sure x axis mirror is OFF in bone edit mode
9) select the entire armature in edit mode and select armature/flip left and right names
10) correct the roll/head/tail/xyz/whatever and everything on the right that is not identical to the left (sucky but necessary)

*at this point you should have an entire armature with all constraints applied and perfectly mirrored properties for the left and the right as well as unique names that identify each bone as well as .L(left) and .R(right) suffixes to the names.

11) turn on x-axis mirror in bone edit mode AND LEAVE IT ON FOREVER. This way no matter what you do to the left or right will automagically happen as a reflection on the opposite


---

I know this didn't exactly answer your question, well, at least not the one click trick that I know you were hoping for but, if you follow these steps you will wind up with a perfectly equal armature.

Really it can be summed up to

1) build the entire left in every way
2) duplicate and flip it
3) automatically rename
4) correct the entire right - which this should mostly be just the bone roll but I would check everything that can be considered a property.

note: work your way up from the granchildest bone ending at the parents. If you go the other way every time you edit a bones properties you will fuck up the one you just fixed.

So, let's say bone A is the parentest bone and B is next in line. Editing B will fuck up A. So if you went to C then D, etc you are just leaving a trail of fuck ups. Go the other way. I know it seems like it should be the other way but it's not.

[MadGypsy]

I'm sort of a stone-age rig kind of guy

This is bad. Rigs are one of those things where the less you know the more work you do. My last post had one sucky step that really shouldn't be necessary and I know a way around it but it is even more complicated to set up.

The bottom line is though, control rig and constraints make the difference between spending forever just to get decent poses and spending no time completing entire animations.

If you want I can teach you how to rig. I can do it in less than 35 minutes and I don't have 10 minutes of fluff to share with you before we get started. I can show you how to do it with almost no right side correction but, you will have to do half of everything twice or I can show you the "correct the right" method which will have you doing everything in halves twice. In other words, the workload is the same, just different.

[Tea Monster]

LOL, but I won't feel it's a proper YouTube tut unless you tell me all about your freind who came around yesterday and wouldn't shut up about save the badgers :p .

Actually I would like that if you could give me some pointers, it would be great

[MadGypsy]

@pointers = great

I'll do better than that. Wait til you see my armature tutorial! I've been writing it all day (napped 4 hours and now I'm back on it). This is not a tutorial for noobs. A noob could definitely do it. I even provide every iota of information, but it moves at light speed. This tutorial is definitely designed for someone that is already comfortable with blender AND has a brain that thinks. That thinking thing is critical. Mostly because I allude to repetitious steps instead of repeating myself constantly. For instance:

parent con_boneName(.L) to sameBoneName(.L)

that one line represents the "algorithm" for parenting every single bone. Except, I just made that up and nowhere in my tutorial will you have to do that exact command but, there are similar situations.

Anyway, back to it. I promise my tutorial is going to blow you away.

[SzaONE]

btw...

[MadGypsy]

I found the trick for correcting bad armature roll on a negatively sized duplicate.

After you have flipped left and right names and with x-axis mirror on, select the entire side that you created. Press cntrl+r and roll the bones. RIGHT click (AKA "never mind").... all bones are perfectly rolled/loc/rot/everything on a mirror.