Creating new characters from existing one.

Hi all,

I have a cartoon bird character and I want to create a few more of them, about 10.

I thought that I could simply duplicate the character, then adjust the scaling of various joints in each bird to get subtle differences in the body shape. Then maybe use lattices to get some more variation, and finally create differences in the texture map for each character.

This would not take too long to do.

Would this be an acceptable way to go about it? Or would I be better off detaching the skin of the original, duplicating it several times, tweaking the meshes to get different characteristics and then creating a new rig to fit each of the new body meshes.

Thanks for any advice.

I have a similar situation, where I have the same humanoid structure, just different sizes of limbs etc, and am trying to modify the same rig to fit other characters. I posted a thread but have received no reply to that. I am, however plodding along and experimenting. If I come up with a solution I will be happy to post it here.

The problem I found with duplicating the character and then scaling joints to change the character's shape is that, afterwards when I tried to rotate a joint (which had been scaled) when animating, the joint started stretching.

So in the end I did create new characters by duplicating the original and then scaling joints and deforming with lattices etc. But then for each new character I had to detatch the skin with bake history on, and then create a new rig for each.

did you re-orient the joints after changing them?

Hi,

Is that done using "modify - freeze transformations - joint orient"? I did try that but I still seemed to get the same stretching in the joints going on.

Make sure all axis of rotation are in the same directions for each remade character.

X should be pointing up the back
Y pointing OUT the back
Z pointing towards right arm for each joint (except the ends)

Select a joint
Press F8 (component mode)
RMB Click the ? button and
Select LOCAL ROTATION AXES (LRA) from selection mask

At this point you will see ALL (LRA's) of each joint

Make sure to select the LRA of each joint
Use ROTATE TOOL to rotate axis 180 degrees in X.

Another way is to use MEL Script

Select Joint and enter this code in MEL(command to rotate X 180 degrees):

rotate -relative -objectSpace 180 0 0

Good Luck CG Dude!

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