tredeger
02-19-2006, 01:25 AM
So I'm getting into the whole custom rig thing and I'm a bit confused on the best approach for drawing chains and laying out a rig so that it will be easy for the animator to use.
Some of the things I've seen go badly on other rigs:
1. If you rig from biped guide with the arms set to have mirrored controls, so as to be able to rotate both arms together in unison symmetrically, you end up having to endure I really counter-intuitive quirk when animating just the second arm. All the joints down to the fingers are negatively scaled which in practice means that to rotate along a single axis you have to drive the manipulator in the opposite direction you want the joint to actually rotate. Trying to rotate in all three axes at once is just to confusing really do at all. I suppose this is the only way to get mirrored arms, but it seems like a pretty hefty tradeoff.
2. One of the rigs I'm currently using has been cobbled together Frankenstien-like and has a bunch of the controls basically oriented upside down in worldspace when they are in their base position. Additionally, on some controls, up (or in their case down) is the z axis while on other cons it's the y axis. Axis inconsistency and inverted axes makes working with the fcurve editor a real headache.
So I started drawing out some chains to test out the workflow and just want to know if you guys have tips on how to ensure these problems don't occur and if you could warn of any other pitfalls to avoid.
A few things that confuse me a bit- I'm not sure I understand the distinction between a 2D and a 3D chain since once they have been drawn, both can be rotated in all 3 axes. Should one be preffered for particular uses? Is a 2d chain just a chain whose bones are constrained to a 2d plane during the creation process?
How does one go about "zeroing" out the joints. I know you can set neutral pose on the joints, but freezing sends them back to their original creation state. My confusion here is how do i get a duplicate chain mirrored for the other side of the body WITHOUT ending up with the negative scaling problem I mentioned above. Is there a way of adjusting the chain after it's drawn and then just setting this up as if the new positions were the ones you'd originally drawn? Is set neutral pose sufficient for this?
Finally, I noticed on the rig from biped guide, you manipulate an ik arm directly by translating the effector. Rotation is apparently disabled and to rotate the wrist you manipulate the bone beneath the effector. I like the rigs where the wrist rotation is driven by the rotation of the con used to move the ik arm in translation. But these usually involve an object being used as a con to which the ik effector is constrained. Can it just be done with the ik effector directly? I noticed on the rigs that use constraints between cons and effectors, it makes the ik/fk blending problematic as the ik effector isn't having keys set on it.
Thanks so much for any help. I really have RTFM'ed this stuff but it's terribly confusing. Sorry for my extreme ignorance with these issues.
Some of the things I've seen go badly on other rigs:
1. If you rig from biped guide with the arms set to have mirrored controls, so as to be able to rotate both arms together in unison symmetrically, you end up having to endure I really counter-intuitive quirk when animating just the second arm. All the joints down to the fingers are negatively scaled which in practice means that to rotate along a single axis you have to drive the manipulator in the opposite direction you want the joint to actually rotate. Trying to rotate in all three axes at once is just to confusing really do at all. I suppose this is the only way to get mirrored arms, but it seems like a pretty hefty tradeoff.
2. One of the rigs I'm currently using has been cobbled together Frankenstien-like and has a bunch of the controls basically oriented upside down in worldspace when they are in their base position. Additionally, on some controls, up (or in their case down) is the z axis while on other cons it's the y axis. Axis inconsistency and inverted axes makes working with the fcurve editor a real headache.
So I started drawing out some chains to test out the workflow and just want to know if you guys have tips on how to ensure these problems don't occur and if you could warn of any other pitfalls to avoid.
A few things that confuse me a bit- I'm not sure I understand the distinction between a 2D and a 3D chain since once they have been drawn, both can be rotated in all 3 axes. Should one be preffered for particular uses? Is a 2d chain just a chain whose bones are constrained to a 2d plane during the creation process?
How does one go about "zeroing" out the joints. I know you can set neutral pose on the joints, but freezing sends them back to their original creation state. My confusion here is how do i get a duplicate chain mirrored for the other side of the body WITHOUT ending up with the negative scaling problem I mentioned above. Is there a way of adjusting the chain after it's drawn and then just setting this up as if the new positions were the ones you'd originally drawn? Is set neutral pose sufficient for this?
Finally, I noticed on the rig from biped guide, you manipulate an ik arm directly by translating the effector. Rotation is apparently disabled and to rotate the wrist you manipulate the bone beneath the effector. I like the rigs where the wrist rotation is driven by the rotation of the con used to move the ik arm in translation. But these usually involve an object being used as a con to which the ik effector is constrained. Can it just be done with the ik effector directly? I noticed on the rigs that use constraints between cons and effectors, it makes the ik/fk blending problematic as the ik effector isn't having keys set on it.
Thanks so much for any help. I really have RTFM'ed this stuff but it's terribly confusing. Sorry for my extreme ignorance with these issues.