Thanks for sharing this. Are you hungry for feedback? If you are, read on.
I’m impressed how you hide the forearm control bone. A bold innovation. The forearm still produces a channel driver, in the timeline, but the screen interface is a lot cleaner. Essentially you control the forearm by “translating” the hand control bone. Neat.
What you’ve done here is giving me ideas about how to handle the shoulder bone. I’ve often felt that an independent shoulder bone is a bit of a chore to deal with. Here’s a thread, about this issue:
What you’ve done with the forearm is inspiring. I am going to have to consider handling the shoulders in a similar fashion. I never would’ve imagined that just hiding a bone would work this well, if I hadn’t seen it in your rig! :buttrock:
One thing, though, about the FK nature of your rig. Some artists will like it, but others may object to it. There are some fellows, such as Raf Anzovin, who are very adept at positioning the entire bicep-forearm chain by grabbing the tip of the forearm. In his NLA tutorial, you can watch Raf at work. It’s like watching Mozart handle a violin. He uses the loosey-goosey nature of an FK chain to his advantage. Your arm rig does not allow for this; to pose your arm one must jump between the bicep and the hand. A klutz (i.e. myself) usually has to jump back and forth between the two bones several times, to fine-tune the position. I could imagine someone like Raf might object to the lack of direct control over the entire chain. Other animators, though, won’t mind. I recall Justin Barrett once mentioning that he nearly always uses the rotate manipulator whenever animating an FK chain. In other words Justin prefers the added control that comes from rotating each bone seperately. Guys like Justin might dig your rig!
Well, that’s about it. Thanks again for sharing this, Pat. I’ve saved a copy of your tutorial about this rig onto my hard disc. Valuable stuff.
Thanks Carl.
This is the kind of feed back I need so I can tweak the rig shown below before releasing it to
the AM community.
<<What you’ve done here is giving me ideas about how to handle the shoulder bone.>>
I did this while hammering out the rig but I did not think much of it so I left it out.
I will put it back for you and post the updated rig by sunday.
<<In his NLA tutorial, you can watch Raf at work. It’s like watching Mozart handle a violin. He uses the loosey-goosey nature of an FK chain to his advantage.>>
I too was blown away by his control over the loosey-goosey chain.
My rig can only emulate this in the IK mode which I have not mastered yet
so I use it sparingly.
<<Justin prefers the added control that comes from rotating each bone seperately. Guys like Justin might dig your rig! >>
At the suggestion of Carl Raillard I have added
Auto lifting shoulder to the arm rig @ http://www.sonofpat.com/IA_Files/Arm_Rig2.prj
I works like this once the biceps is rotated above
the horizontal axis the shoulder bone automatically
rotates.
It was in the rig originally but I omitted it previously
because I do not like how the arm rotates when the
shoulder lifts and I cannot get a convincing shrug with
this setup.
I prefer your previous rig, for the reason you state. The ability to do a convincing shrug is pretty important. At least for me it is.
I think you might’ve misunderstood my previous post. Or maybe I expressed myself poorly. Probably the latter . I don’t think having an auto-lifting mechanism for the shoulder is a particularly good idea; I’ve never seen one which allowed for decent shoulder shrugs. What I think would be cool is if the bicep control bone had the ability to rotate a hidden shoulder bone, in a manner akin to the way your hand control bone rotates your hidden forearm bone. This would require retooling the FK chain in the arm. Specifically, the start of the bicep bone would have to be attached to the end of the shoulder bone (the bicep needs to be an attached to its parent, the shoulder bone). This would make it a proper FK chain. Then you could reproduce your magic and set up a bicep control bone that would guide the hidden shoulder bone, in much the same way that your hand cb guides the hidden forearm. Gimme a rig like that, and I shall say “That is coolness.”
So, bottom line: Go back to your previous rig. Your instincts were sound about the shoulder-shrugging limitation. A character has to be able to shrug its shoulders. http://www.sonic.net/raillard/hash/shrug.mov
In addition to the original features has two new improvements;
Dragging the biceps control now gives convincing shrugs
A new hybrid kinematic system for the arm.
It works like this. Dragging the biceps control gives the
standard forward kinematic behavior, but dragging the
hand control gives inverse kinematics.
This would make animating with inverse kinematics easier
because it is now easier to get arcs.
Someone may have come up with it already, but this is new to me
and I thought it would be quite useful for those who are struggling
with IK animation since there is no need for IK/FK switching.
The project file contains three actions that are opened and displayed.
The one on the left is the rig in FK.
The one in the middle is the hybrid kinematics system.
The one on the right is the hybrid kinematic system with the hand
translated to the “hip” bone.
Please give them all a try. I can do with some feed back on whether
these two new additions should be included in the complete rig that I’m posting for christmas
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. I don’t think having an auto-lifting mechanism for the shoulder is a particularly good idea; I’ve never seen one which allowed for decent shoulder shrugs. What I think would be cool is if the bicep control bone had the ability to rotate a 