Building A Mr. Fantastic/Elasti-Girl Rig?

[pooby]

I understand that Rigging is Rigging (just as Modeling is Modeling, Animating is Animating, etc). It's just the tools and programs that differ. So I don't care if you've got experience in 3DMax, Maya, etc., any and all information will help. I'll try to figure it out in Lightwave.

Hi Shuggs,

'Modelling IS Modelling', because what you end up with is vertices and Polys but 'Rigging is Rigging', doesn't really cover it because in LW, you only have bones as useful deformers, and a set of motion modifiers that dont communicate with one another whereas in Maya Max and Xsi etc, you have a huge arsenal of deformers and complete constraint systems.

I have made an experimental rig like this in the past in XSI. The way I did it in basic terms was to have a flexible curve based rig that is constrained to a rigid biped rig, or blended to a set of curve controllers. It's relatively straigtforward to do because you have a solid set of quaternion based blendable constraints, and animatable curves and lattices.

IN Lightwave, you have none of these, and there is no equivavlent either. The nearest thing to an animatable curve is Shift-spine-transform, which wouldn't work as it just bends geometry and doesn't allow things to be constrained to it.
There is also a PLG plugin called curvebone, which will make a splineIK system, but the bones cannot be stretched along the curve.
Also there is now (as part of the DP kit) a nodal motion modifier. This allows bones to be 'parented' to geometry. you can use SubD'd geometry to act as a fake curve, then parent bones to it.
But there is no stable way of blending between one rig and another. Although you can blend between baked Mdd animations, but it adds an extra level of complexity and planning.
In LW, you are better off trying to cheat it with switching camera views and replacing the rig with a different one in the cut.

I know LW rigging inside out and upside down, and I know for sure that it will be a nightmare to do this and you're likely to end up AT BEST after tons of work with something that's awkward but kind of works. As part of your solution to the problem, the biggest positive step you could make IMO, is to find some appropriate software to rig it in.

As you are a student, you can probably aquire an educational version of your software of choice. If you are not using this rig commercially, you could use the FREE XSI mod tool (which has all XSI's rigging tools) and bake the resulting animation back to LW for rendering.

[Shuggs]

This sounds like such a nightmare. I'm still a beginner when it comes to rigging. The word scares me from time to time, and I usually try to avoid it at all costs. What you just described sounded like trigonometry to me. :scream: Camera angles would probably be my best bet, then, as well as having more than one rig. Would morph targets work for this? Let's say that I need the upper body to stretch, and make that in Modeler as a Morph target, and played around with the slider? Or perhaps even the arms, hands, and legs? I guess I have some experimenting to do because I don't know how that would react with bones and the IK set-up I have on the first rig.

I appreciate your feedback! Very helpful! Larry Shultz also had a tutorial up for a stretchy-guy rig using IK Booster that I might have to refer to again to set up a second rig. Again, I'm going to go ahead and test out the morph target idea. I might throw in a very basic skeletal structure with no IK so goals and targets don't go wonky on me. Thanks!

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