Character rigging and mocca troubles

[JamesMK]

I'm very new to Cinema myself, so you shouldn't expect any advice from me --- BUT, have you read this thread? ---> http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=60325&perpage=15&pagenumber=1 (beware, it's a long one :D)

[Spearhead]

Im new to animation aswell and i often get the same issues. More often than not it has been one of three things affecting this.

Bad placement of the bone, that includes rotational placement, size and such.

Bad weighting setup.

Bad mesh. I noticed a badly modelled mesh behaves pretty whacky when animating.

I think MOCCA is very powerful but its a tough learning curve so i have been checking out other software.

As a tip: i tried messiah:animate which i found a bit easier to rig in. I heard rumours of a new and better version for release in the near future.

Not much help for your question but check the 3 things above, tweaking those should get the flaws away.

[JamesMK]

On a more general note - I have rigged and animated characters before, only not in Cinema - I could follow up on Spearhead's points and say:

a) if the mesh is clean and animation-friendly, and
b) if the bones are well-placed, constrained and sufficiently many

- then it's often not even necessary to do any weighting.

What I've found most of the time is that I usually don't put enough bones in the rig to start with. And even more important than the mere number::.. bones are only (mostly) rotational centers. They really shouldn't be called "bones" at all - "local deformation rotational pivot point" would be a better word... But that's more than a mouthful :D

[LucentDreams]

I don't do much blending in my weighting, but I strill prefer using weights to using the limits built into the bones.

My advice to you is to find out how to work C4D bones like mayas. See maya has a joint based bones system, ours is a limb based bone system, I'm finding maya's is far better by default, but so far have done most of what I can do in maya in C4D. Only thing missing for me at the moment is spline IK.

[minada]

Hi,
Yes, I've had much the same experience with MOCCA. I've used MAX and Character Studio successfully for 6 years and my efforts to rig in C4D have been nothing but horrific. Weeks of hacking and researching with nothing to show for it but misery. Like you, I find much to like in C4D, and I don't mind putting in time as long as the time ultimately pays off. . .
There is hope, however! Make sure you check out the "sticky" forum on "Learning to Walk" just above this thread. There are some nice example rigs there that should work for you. So far, I've really liked Stray's rig. And. . . it doesn't use Soft IK! I found it easy and straightforward to animate and stable too. Be sure you read his recent troubleshoot post that corrects an odd anomaly in the rig. There are at least a few other rigs in the thread that seem to work well too. Kai is working on a C4D rigging CD that I am looking forward to seeing soon as well.
Good luck,
Miles

[bry]

Hi Bucket,

I understand you perfectly, since I've been using Maya a lot for Character Rigging and now have a project I want to completely do inside C4D.
If I could get the Character Rigging and Animation tools from Maya and the rest of the workflow and render engine of C4D together I'd be a happy man.

Character Rigging in C4D is way slower than in maya, but it can be done well too. The thing is that SoftIK is very diferent from the other app's IK. You have to get used to it.

I still prefer HardIK because it's far more predictable and the workflow is faster too. If you use HardIK, you can pretty much create the same rigs you do in Maya (although I never did it in 5 minutes as I did in Maya!), the only drawback is that most of Mocca tools were made to work only with SoftIK, which means you won't take advantage of some of them.
Anyway, you can use HardIK and recreate a Maya rig and still use Mocca's Claude Bonet to paint weights and Xpresso to add lots of custom control.

In 2 months I'll start a Character Rigging tutorial for Cinema4D where I'll cover in depth a character rig both with SoftIK and HardIK, I hope it will be helpful to everyone.

Bruno

[LucentDreams]

you siad it bry, it seems too, that everyones misconceptions of SIK is that its the save all feature, and is designed for a whole character. Hey if your doing a cartoony squashy stretchy character, then go for it, give it a go, but for most animation its not what SIK was really designed for. Who needs dynamics and followthrough on a thigh/shin of a human like character? Then why use SIK.

Biggest problem with HIK right now is lack of upvector, there are other issues of course, but thats the biggy.


if you missed them here are some teasers for my CD.

IK/FK switching
http://cgi.third-era.com/~kaiskai/misc/IKFK.mov
Early Version Leg rig (many improvments and additions since chi did this test for me)
http://cgi.third-era.com/~kaiskai/misc/legrigtest.avi

Its all possible, and not too hard really. IK/FK was the most difficult, I tried three ways of my own, the one included on the CD is an expansion on one made by Sven Hauth, simply because while it may seem a little limiting, its the most consistent, reliable of all the methods I've tried to date.

[jimarse]

I'm sure you all know about Paul Everett's upcoming contraints tag plugin, but in case you didn't, there's a picture in the following thread:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=72249&perpage=15&highlight=constraints&pagenumber=3

I think this will bring to Cinema a lot of the crucial tools are missing for hard IK rigging, and hopefully make it as easy as in Maya.

[bry]

Hi,

that's a great plugin tag indeed, but it's not Paul Everett's, it's MmeSadie's!

This is the tag that will make great HardIK rigs possible in C4D!

Bruno

[AdamT]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned here is that there will eventually be fbx import/export for Cinema, meaning that you'll be able to use Motion Builder for Cinema animations. Once this happens IMO we will have the best of both worlds--Cinema's amazing workflow/stability/renderer + MBs awesome CA tools. It can't come soon enough for me. :wise:

[LucentDreams]

yes, when that constrainer plugin is available to you guys, you reallys hould get it, this will alow you to do certain types of dynamic parenting, and has upvecotrs for HARDIK without having to use exrepressions and SIK tags and all that like the rig onmy CD will have. Per anders has done a wonderful job on this plugin which reminds me I've got some stuff to do for him today too (oi how'd I get so busy lately?)

[jimarse]

>that's a great plugin tag indeed, but it's not Paul Everett's, it's MmeSadie's!

Ooops. My bad! Sorry.


Adam-- you sure are putting a lot of stock into the MotionBuilder option. I bought the 1 yr lisence too and while it's definitely an exciting piece of software, I'm not convinced yet how well it's going to fit into a Cinema character animation pipline (or mine anyway). I guess it will depend on how good the Cinema FBX support is, how easy it's going to be to set up and export face/hands morph targets and wotnot, and how smooth all the importing and exporting will be, but I for one am not chucking my Mocca manual just yet. What about characters built with hypernurbs for example? I know FBX doesn't support stuff built with Maya's sub-division surfaces, so I suspect it may be the same with hypernurbs. Plus there's no support for muscle deformation things or skinning helpers like set driven key FFDs. It's things like this that I think will make MB really great for animating fairly generic biped characters walking around in architechture visualisation pieces and stuff like that, but for subtler personality based animation, I reckon it may end up being easier just to stay in Cinema.

Hope I'm wrong actually, but there you are.

[LucentDreams]

Originally posted by jimarse
but I for one am not chucking my Mocca manual just yet. What about characters built with hypernurbs for example? I know FBX doesn't support stuff built with Maya's sub-division surfaces, so I suspect it may be the same with hypernurbs. Plus there's no support for muscle deformation things or skinning helpers like set driven key FFDs. It's things like this that I think will make MB really great for animating fairly generic biped characters walking around in architechture visualisation pieces and stuff like that, but for subtler personality based animation, I reckon it may end up being easier just to stay in Cinema.

Hope I'm wrong actually, but there you are.

Good choice on not chucking out the manual yet, I think some people are getting their hopes a little too high on FBX like what happened with PMG. However some of your concerns you shouldn't worry about. HN won't be a concern really, even if MB does drop the HN, when its brought back you drop it back int o an HN, but I"m sure maxon and the testers will make sure if thats the case, that the importer would at least drop it in automtically, musn't mix up subdivision surfaces in maya with polygon subdivisions in maya, which is like our hypernurbs. subdivision surfaces are very different in how they are generated so its understandable that MB would have issues, whether its AW's fault or a simple limit in MB SDK is anyones guess, but I bet MB wasn't designed with intentions to deal with that.

Set dirven KJey FFD's aren't as much of an issue either, since the animation data is transfered, ideally you should still be able to have those expressions setup, an while they won't exist inside MB, when the animatino is brought back into C4D, the bones are animated, and thus drive the set driven keys for muscle bulges and such.

[AdamT]

Without question the utility of putting MB into the pipeline will depend entirely on the quality of Maxon's fbx support. I believe this will eventually be worked out since it is Maxon doing the work (and not PMG). But assuming this comes to pass, there's just no question that MB is a better CA tool than Mocca--full stop. If it doesn't come to pass, then Mocca's not bad either.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.