Armature Tutorial

[MadGypsy]

I'm still gonna check out this rigging though with your tut when i find time.

Oh no doubt hopefully I will be finished with my book by then and you can just use the info in that. There is a bunch that my arm tutorial is not telling you. I can even give a simple example.

The hand on my armature is 100% wrong. You may think "Hunh? What's wrong about it? I followed your tutorial and the hand worked great." - sure it did, because "you" didn't try and bind it to a model. If you tried to bind it to a model you would notice that the hand is rotated 90 degrees from where it should be and fixing it does not require just rotation. If your arm was really positioned like that your forearm bone would be twisted yet there is no twist on my armature. That's cause it is wrong.

To truly fix my tutorial you would have to scale the hand control bone down in the wide direction and up on the short direction so that it appears like the bone is "palms up". Then you would have to go in pose mode and rotate the hand bone to seem "palms in" (facing the leg). Then you have to set this pose as the armature rest pose.

This would add the twist to the forearm bone that is necessary for proper deformity and conclude the hand in the proper rest position from the twist.

See? These beta tutorials are pretty good but they don't cover all of the information (hence the beta part). Technically, If you aren't hella smart about topology you would never figure out that the rig is borked. You would just have problems and spend your life trying to weight paint them away.

With that in mind. I would soak up the info I give you in these beta tutorials but be aware that there is info that I haven't given you and it may be important, before trying to commit your results to a model.

You of course can always PM me or ask in this thread if there is something you should know about a specific limb and I will certainly answer or you can wait for the book.

I love armatures. If I ever decided to get serious about some 3d-esque job, I would focus on armatures and posing/animation. I used to think that I only had a passion for modelling but I find armatures far more rewarding. I even used to refuse to get to the armature part because I was sure I was going to hate it. I'd build a model and stop at the UVW part. Now the thought of playing with some tedious edge flow has my entire attitude reversed.

[MadGypsy]

Better Explanation

Hold your arm straight out in a T-pose with your thumb pointing up. Notice you can draw a straight line from your wrist to the lump where your lower and upper arm meet. Now turn your palm face down and you will notice that your wrist turned but that lump didn't.

This is the necessary twist that you need on your armature AND your models edge flow. My current arm rig is in a "palms down" position but there is no twist, so...




Note: in my last post I said you have to be in pose mode for one part of fixing this. That is NOT a fact. It is just easier. To do it in edit mode would require twisting both hand bones into place and you can't see the segments on the forearm to make sure nothing goofy is happening.

Note2: show me one armature tutorial that tells you this. (this = bone twist). Damn near every model tutorial has you twisting the forearm topology but not one armature tutorial out of the many many that I have read/watched mentions twisting the bone to match the mesh. Why not? I'll tell you why, they are all just parroting some basic shit they learned and they don't really know how to make an armature at all.

I probably sound disgruntled. I am. We live in the information age and I have to sit here and figure everything out because the only people sharing information on this subject are those that have very little of it.

Can you get it to work without the twist? Absolutely, it just works so much more natural if everything is doing the same thing to begin with.

[Dutch]

I probably sound disgruntled. I am. We live in the information age and I have to sit here and figure everything out because the only people sharing information on this subject are those that have very little of it.

Join the club. The welding industry is the same damn way. I got lucky that my boss isn't full of bullshit and he actually makes it a goal of his to properly teach young bucks like me, but I would say about 90% of welders aren't that way. Looks like the modeling trade is the same: the pros working in big-time software firms keep to themselves, or else you wouldn't have to rely on weekend warrior modellers with their half-ass tutorials online. But you are shedding some serious light on the subject, and it is sweet to see it unfold. Your attention to natural bone structure (like the forearm deformity) is something I imagine most modellers don't even consider, at least not to the degree you are.

[MadGypsy]

I find myself checking my own armature (the one under my skin) all the time. We were slow at work yesterday and I seriously had nothing to do so, after a couple of holes of Golden Tee (ya, I got paid to play that) I sat down and started rotating my foot in every direction it would go, paying close attention to when the toes are forced to do something because of a foot angle (ya, I got paid to do that too). Then I started thinking about how and which constraints need to be applied to achieve that motion.

That's where all of my "info" on armatures is coming from (my body). Did you know in order to stand in a T-Pose with your palms absolutely face up you actually have to roll your shoulders back a couple degrees? Probably not, but, that's just how sick I get with these details. Actually, If you test that fact it will probably pop your shoulder and it feels really good. That extra little twist to the palms up T-pose is a range your shoulder probably never sees in normal everyday life.

Here's another thing to consider that is a mix of something you knew and didn't know. The human head can rotate roughly 90 degrees in either direction (from center) but in order to compensate for the fact that lower on the body could be rotating your head in world space without actually twisting the neck at all, you have to put pose space constraints on the head so whatever amount of rotation it is experiencing due to a torso twist will be ignored.

Anyway, even with as much as I have figured out I still have a lot to learn. I still haven't learned anything on the far right column of the constraint options. Like ex "clamp to", haven't used it, don't know what it does. "spline IK" is another one that I don't know anything about. I will eventually do the entire options list and officially master bones.

failure note: no matter how much I play with limit rotation I can't seem to get the hand to start and stop at real hand limits. I can get kinda close but I can't seem to get the limits to officially stop where they are supposed to without screwing up some other form of hand rotation. Considering I have been trying to get this hand right for a week, I am under the impression that there is a certain level of realism that is not possible with the editable armature.

[Tea Monster]

It IS gathering interest. I'm finding it very useful. I can't help much with constraints. My co-conspirator over on the Doom forums was asking me about this the other day and I had no idea how to help him out. I've pointed him to here to learn so that is two people making models who have benefited from it.

How about I make you a Quake critter to test it on?

[MadGypsy]

@make critter - hell yeah, go for it!

[MadGypsy]

@Tea Monster - a week or 2 ago you were asking about rigify tuts. I found a good introduction tut. It's a CGCookie tut so it stays on point well.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYiAd_08-0k[/ame]

[Tea Monster]

Yeah, I've used rigify before and it's a good system. It's completely automatic, which I don't regard as a bad thing. I know nothing about that stuff and I don't even know how to use the control surfaces, I just use the bare rigs and pose them by hand. That's why I really appreciate what you've done, it was one part of the 3D journey I didn't even have waypoints on, let alone a map of how to get there.

No probs on the critter, what did you want?

[MadGypsy]

@critter - really, if you could make me a solid humanoid base mesh that considers ALL edgeflow to muscle group topology, I would even pay you for it. I'm not talking about one of these shitty free base meshes. I mean a really solid character that is basically featureless aside from muscle groups.

I don't know if I already said it, but my finished book is not gonna be free. It will probably be free for some of the people here, but it isn't going to be free overall. I need a really good base mesh to complete my book.

We could go 1 of 3 ways. You could just give me the base mesh, like a donation. I could pay you flat out for it, or you can take your chances on some royalties every time I sell a book. The bottom line is, I was going to approach you with this anyway. I want my book to be elite. I can make an elite armature (eventually) but, my models are always "good". Which isn't good enough.

If you know of some elite free base mesh and you can trick me into buying it, more power to you. I really don't think you are like that but, the point is, I need one and I don't want to spend the rest of my life trying to find one to my standard.

@rigify - rigify is a little silly. You generate a token armature, fit it to your character, click a button and the token armature gets replaced with a Nathan Vegdahl rig that has been pre-made. Don't get me wrong, that rig is beast and I'm about to learn a whole lot by reverse engineering it, but in reality all you are doing is smacking a premade rig on your model. The name "rigify" is very misleading. It should be called Generi-Rig or something that expresses how you aren't really rigging at all.

I just use the bare rigs and pose them by hand. That's why I really appreciate what you've done

I'm currently disheartened. I know I can ace this rig business but there are certain things I can't seem to figure out and I can't find ANY info on it. I also finally found some semi-decent rig tutorials and there are some elements that have thrown me for a loop. Little minor factoids that I can't determine whether or not they apply to my rig. The part about that that matters is, the factoids go against the grain on some other information I have. So, either this is a situation that is determined by case or I have to figure out which one is misinformation.

It makes me sad. I am so pumped to make this book but there is this void I've reached and I can't figure out how to fill it, yet. I'm hella tempted to contact Nathan Vegdahl directly and pay him (if I have to) to answer some questions.

[Tea Monster]

I should be able to come up with one. I use one my son came up with, but it's more for production meshes and not optimized for low poly work. I made one for my sailor character, It would be pretty easy to just retopo one of them with correct edge topology. How dense do you want it?

I love the rigify rigs as it's all there right away. I don't use the control rig as I usually just am doing a few poses and then I'm done. When all the control surfaces get loaded, its like flying a crop duster and suddenly being sat down at the controls of an A380. You can just see your last words being "Ohh, what does this do?"

Have you tried dis-assembling some of the free rigs around? All the stuff from Big Buck Bunny and Sintel is available free on the net. Blender Cookie and Blendswap have loads of rigs available to download to do the whole technology transfer thing.

[MadGypsy]

@ mesh - I bought a mesh that was the perfect proportions and good topology, it just doesn't have the muscle groups defined. I'd like to maybe just share this file with you and have you cut the muscles on it. I've already done some work but, it would be better if someone better than me did it.

@ density - the density for the mesh I have is perfect. It was modeled with one or more subdivisions in mind and it has very clean volume. If you work with this model, density is already taken care of.

About muscle groups - I need muscle groups mapped out on the mesh because I intend to get into making them respond to bone movement. I don't want my guy to have "muscles". If you end up using the mesh I have, I want him to look the same, pretty much. I just need a map of the muscles

@free rigs - hunh? wha? free rigs? I never even considered the possibility. Ya know, for as smart as I am, sometimes I am completely oblivious. Heard - free professional rigs for reverse engineering. On it.

Imma send you a PM with a model and a small list of what I need done to it. I have to do a couple things first. It's legit that I send you this model according to the license that I have. Just throwing that out there.