Rigging an Elephants Trunk

[thehive]

could do a ribbon setup, or a spline ik with a stretchy setup

[KielFiggins]

Its pretty unlikely that one setupwill work for all your needs. I would suggest layering your setup in stages to suit each shot.

-Create you joints, call them bind joints, duplicate them for each layer of setup, then constrain the bind joints successively to stages that follow
-Start with a base of only FK joints. This will allow for natural hang, sway and allow precise control
-For picking up an object, splineIK with stretch should work fine: http://stevenkalinowski.com/scripts.html has a stretch script that works well
-Finally, you can through a blend shape mesh set underneath the skin to allow for non uniform or precise deformation control, such as flaring the nostrils. Since its running under the skin, the animation will transfer.

The benefit of this process, is you start animating sooner (with the FK) and start seeing what you really need, whats working, whats not, and then allows you to continue to rig accordingly. Plus, if your shots dont need a particular setup at all, you wont have spent time making it.

Good luck.

ps- if your using maya, dont forget to reference ( http://www.3dfiggins.com/writeups/mayaReference/ ) to make this process much more straight forward and forgiving.

[stjons]

Wow, lots of really useful information there, thanks!
Once again this forum has proven invaluable.

Cheers
Jonny

[stjons]

ok so I have spent a week trying to suss this rig out and its driving me insane. There are so many things going wrong I just cant cope haha. I've basically been trying to implement what I learnt in a digital tutors tutorial about cartoon character rigging, into my own rig. I appear to have the legs sorted, and I thought I had the trunk/head sorted but after trying to sort out the weight painting everything seems to have gone down the drain.

I tried to upload the file onto here but compressed it is 627.kb so I've just uploaded some images of problems I have been having. The first was the first annoyance I had encountered. I set up a basic rig with a spline ik on the trunk, it seemed to all work well and joint together, untill I moved the rig as a whole, which is when I noticed this: trunkmove.jpg (http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=150487&stc=1)

I figured I need to contrain the curve to something but cant figure out what.
Next I'll put an image of the rig as it stands: rig.jpg (http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=150485&stc=1)
I'm sure I am doing a number of things wrong but what I do not know.

Lastly, this is what happens when I rotate the head control: trunkiffy.jpg (http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=150486&stc=1)
As you can see the trunk does not rotate with the head.

Any advice on any of this will be greatly appreciated

Cheers
Jonny

[rEmOs]

hey jonny, for the problem of moving the whole character u should make sure that inherit transformation of the spline curve in the attribute editor is checked off i think this will fix the problem of moving the character. I dont know if u made a ctrl over the whole trunk or not but u should do and then parent it under the head ctrl... I hope it works man
Best wishes :)

[stjons]

hey thanks for the reply
I went back and deleted the spline Ik I had along with all the control handles, and then rebuilt it making sure to uncheck the inherit transform. Its working now, just need to tweak the weights on it all.

Cheers

[stjons]

Ok I've been running into problems non stop whilst trying to rig this character, I've worked a fair few out but this one has stumped me. When I rotate Jaw Z on my head control, which is linked to my Jaw end bone, I get a few CV's stretching and distorting along with the jaw. I thought this was to do with my weight painting but now I'm not so sure as one of the cvs that is moving is in the tail, and its not influenced by any points around the head.
faulty head.jpg (http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=150555&stc=1)
I've uploaded a shot of whats happening and the component editor. I have had a lot of problems, so its possible I have gone wrong somewhere which is effecting this.
component.jpg (http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=150554&stc=1)

Cheers, and sorry for keeping this thread going, this rigging stuff if just bogging me down. I want to get it done so I can start animating.

Thanks
Jonny

Edit: I think i've solved it now, it required detatching the skin from the joints, deleting half of the model, mirroring it again and then deleting the history.

[Darksuit]

hopefully you aren't runnign into any more problems. Normally I would have chimed in to offer some pointers but this has been a fairly busy week.

Two things you will want to do. before you even start rigging, delete history and freeze transforms. When you put a control in place do the same things. It shouold literaly become your mantra.

Name everything. Which it looks like you are doing.

Problems with spline IK clusters can generally be solved by setting the clusters to be relative instead of absolute. Or by adjusting the Hierarchy.

Heirarchy is king of rigging. If the flow of the rig is not right then you will just run into issues. Test small scale, and test as you go along.

[stjons]

Cheers for the advice. At the moment I am problem free, but that could all change soon. I'm currently weight painting aand then need to add a few more controls in before moving onto the blend shapes. This rig is more complex then anything I have attempted before, so it is a huge learning process.
I'm also going to attempt to add influences (I believe thats what they are called) to help the deformations look more realistic, but I do not know weather to try using maya muscle, or just follow the tutorial I found on placing influences under the mesh.

Yeah I have named everything so far, thats one thing that stuck with me after my last attempt at rigging.

Cheers
Jonny

[stjons]

Ok I aparently spoke to soon, I am having problems trying to sort my rig out to let me have control in the hips. I want to be able to have a hip control that will rotate the hips but also enable me to have the elephant look as though he sitting like a dog. I figured connecting the legs to the root spine joint would do this but I get funny results. So I have added 2 new joints in the same location as the spine joint. One called Main, which I have parented everything to, and one which I have parented my legs to. I am unsure if this is correct, or where to go from here.

I've uploaded a picture of the rig and the outliner, I'm sure I have a good starting point, but I have been wrong before.

rig2.jp (http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=150620&stc=1)g (http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=150620&stc=1) (http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=150621&stc=1)
outliner.jpg (http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=150621&stc=1)

Cheers
Jonny

[Darksuit]

It looks like you may have too many joints in the hip and leg area. When you do a quadredped you are most of the time just build a biped rig that has a 90 degree turn at the pelvis. The key diverence is that on some quads you have an additional set of legs in place of the arms.

So your Root join is going to be doing most of the driving for the rig, you can put it and the pelvis joint on top of each other and just not skin the root joint to anyhting. This typically sloves the issue of an indepently rotating Hip. Other solutions I have seen are to create a group node that is placed at the rotation point of the hips/pelvis then parent the legs under the group then parent the group under the root

this gives the same effect as if the root and pelvis joint are in the same location. Or better yet its just placing a joint with a group since the joint would not be skinned.

[stjons]

Ok, I understand now, i'm really hoping I can finish this rig off this weekend. I completly under estimated how long it would take.

Thanks for all your help, once again this forum has saved me

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