Drivers in 2.53

#1

I am new to blender and I’m trying to get to grips with rigging. I’ve managed to replicate a rig I like using in Maya but now I’m trying to work on IK/FK switching. I have my arms set up but I can’t figure out how to set up driver so I can use an object to control the influence of constraints. All the information I can find seems to be either for 2.49 or prior or it seems like things have moved since in 2.53 vs the version used in tutorials. Can anyone give me some tip for setting up some drivers?

Thanks for your help.

#2

I think you can try the tutorials by tobuslieven in youtube:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5SNZJPEh0o
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8IsnFG9NUU

These are from Alpha 0, but AFAIK the animation interface hasn’t changed that much since. What you probably want is located in the part 2, but doesn’t hurt to watch also the part 1 if you are new to Blender.

Best Regards

J.

#3

Thanks, I’ll take a look.

One more question while I’m here. I’ve read that grouping has a similar function to mayas selection sets. I can’t seem to make a group from a selection of bones and a mesh though. Any ideas?

Thanks again.

#4

bones are not all separate objects, rather they are all part of one armature object,
you probably have to tab into object mode from the pose mode on the armature
to be able to group the armature + mesh object.

mind you, I could be wrong, don’t deal much with animation/rigs.

#5

I don’t know about maya’s system (also i’m not much into animation, sorry), so probably i can’t help you much, but AFAIK, in Blender bone groups are possible when you enter in “Pose Mode” (Select an armature or a bone (depending if you are in object or edit mode) and in the mode selector the option of selecting the pose mode. Nahh… i’m not so good in english, an image will do:

The bone groups tab will be selectable only in pose mode. The usual workflow is to add a group with the “+” icon, give a name, select the bones you want to assign, press “assign”, and optionally you can give some color to the group of bones (altough it seems somewhat unfinished, but works.).

I think that should do. Consider also view the tutorials by tobuslieven on youtube, since he’s done a good deal explaining some of the features that aren’t yet documented in a official manual.

Hope it helps.

#6

I cover drivers and how they work in
http://blenderlabrat.blogspot.com/2010/09/249-25-migration-animation.html

you should also have a look at the simple adult rig from durian.blender.org

#7

Thanks for the help everyone. I got some time yesterday to look through the tobuslieven tutorials and that helped. I actually watched those previously but I’m actually using 2.54(I got it wrong in the thread title) and the differences between to 2.5 threw me.

Thanks mfoxdogg, I’m downloading all of the videos in your link now. Looks like some interesting stuff.

As for the selection set thing I should probably go through what I want to get out of it to see if you guys know a process.

Basically I’m trying to do some game development in Unity. I have my character and some test animations but I need to export the mesh, the bones it’s weighted to and the animation baked down to those bones, in fbx format. Unity can also take the blend files and do the conversion itself. The problem is that I don’t want to export all the bones that I use for control objects that aren’t deforming the mesh. I pretty much have the same number of bones or more controlling the skeleton as I do weighted to the mesh. Even if I do make up a selection set of my mesh and the deformation bones blender doesn’t seem to have an “export selected” command. Does anyone have any tips?

Thanks everyone.

#8

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