Free monkey rig!

#1


Here’s another lovely little freebie for you!
It’s one of the pirate monkey ninjas, currently in develpment here at useful slug, fully body rigged and absolutely aching to be animated! I have personally rigged the model based on the wonderful TD work by Marek ‘maks’ Schneider and Christopher ‘Suricate’ Lutz.

Animation works like this: Click’n’drag whatever you want to wherever you want. It’s based on screen position so I suggest using a divided double screen to reduce view rotation. Shortcut: ‘w’

Middle mouse button resets that part to setup values (very useful if you get lost)

Right mouse button is for alternative measures (I.E. bank rotation)

I highly recommend this way of working: Use only the regular controls to animate the character, THEN once you’ve finished, use the stretchy controls on top as a different ‘layer’ of control to add that little bit extra. The FK can become a little bit unintuitive if you don’t (especially the spine)

You’ll need to have this powerful plugin made by Christopher Lutz installed in messiah\plugins:
http://www.usefulslug.com/messiahrig/BoneController.mp

And you’ll need to have this wonderful script made by Marek Schneider in messiah\modules\scripts:
http://www.usefulslug.com/messiahrig/mk_SpineChain2.msa

My friends: The rig!
http://www.usefulslug.com/messiahrig/CaptainRigBeta0001.mpj

A short demo of the motion (before deformations were properly addressed):
http://www.usefulslug.com/messiahrig/rigtest.mov

And a small bit of animation I’ve made with it if you’re still paying attention.
http://www.usefulslug.com/messiahrig/rendertest5.mov

#2

…need… …time…

Thanks Ulven!
Will give it a go as soon as time allows…
David

#3

Yes Ulven, thank you :thumbsup:

#4

Have some fun with it. This time I want to see some of your animation with it! Don’t just pull it around in the T position. I think some drunken kung fu might be good for this guy.
Inspiration
I’ve already discovered that to get > 360 rotations one must use the editsphere for the main hip control. I’ll see if this is possible to change but for now the editsphere works allright for this.

#5

Nice inspiration. Just waiting on my dongle. Thanks again for sharing all your work.

#6

Thanks for sharing. It is very educational.

#7

My first Messiah “character” animation. The timing is a bit off. But I learned a few things about keyframing, previewing, etc. So thanks Ulven.

http://www.cginsomniac.com/WIP/pirate.avi

I did come across a few issues. It seems the dots don’t stay in their locations. I’m not sure if this is user error or what. But the dots just get all out of whack.

#8

I’ve discovered the dots going ‘out of whack’ sometimes as well and narrowed down where the problem lies. Is seems that sometimes it doesn’t register the OnMouseUp in the right location and therefore doesn’t execute that part of the armature. A hotfix for this is to apply an OnMouseOut version as well of the realigning of the dot. I’ll try to fix this later today if I can find the time.

#9

Sorted. Replaced the old file on our server so just download the same project file again if you prefer a non-buggy version :slight_smile:

#10

Cool rig I will use to to see hwo to make mor esophisticated rigs myself. My rigs right now are primtive.

#11

excellent stuff Ulven :applause:

your rigging in messiah like a guru !! Top stuff :thumbsup:

#12

Dann-O: Well, there’s nothing wrong with a simple rig. If you want to learn something like this I suggest trying to isolate one part of the body and looking at all the expressions and armatures relating to that part, open another instance of messiah and just start manually copying the steps. Most of it’s fairly ordered.

T4D: Thanks mate! Long time, no …eeem…read. How’s life treating you?
Yeah messiah just makes rigging… painless. For the moment I’m still mostly copying the masters.

#13

yeah sorry i dropped off the planet there for you,.:sad: I’m just too dam busy 70 hours a week and when I have a spair moment the kids and the beach or park keep calling me ( good to go outside somtimes :slight_smile: )

and I’m sure you know all great artist steal ideas from the masters, rigging is no different :thumbsup:

If you have the chance check the Max & maya rigging tutorials out
Some more great ideas there :slight_smile: all work within Messiah without to much work
Now that I’ve played with your rig, I have to say Your one of the Masters now:bowdown:

#14

Haha! Excellent! Well just make sure you have a good time in the sun, you deserve it! I’ll look into the Max/Maya/XSI side of things as well if oppurtunity arises. There’s a few things I’ve seen particularly on the foot setups that might be good to incorporate in my messiah rigs.

I should thank David Maas (dobermunk) as well for releasing the Arnat rig so I could see what the devil Marek had been up to in those rigs. Thanks David!

#15

If all releases were met with the energy that you’ve brought to this one, I’d be doing more!
If you want advanced stuff, check the fish rig in the messiah content. a triple system (manual, dynamic, sinusidal) On one rig… from Ron G. and Marek S.
With my feedback, testing and modeling…

#16

The rig could use some limits on the joints as well Ulven. Though I didn’t get to play with things as much as I would have liked.

#17

Thanks Dobermunk, I hope there will be more releases. I’ll look at the fish rig but I’m no mathematician! I’ve got quite some experience cod fishing in Norway though.

Nichod: I tbink the knees can do with some porper knee constraints but, limits…if you’re thinking joint roatation linmits… they’ve always felt quite rigid to me and sometimes you DO want to go beyond the normal. It’s left up to the animators. What do the other animators think? Should there be more limits on the natural motion range of things? I know that I don’t personally feel that it’s too difficult to judge with this rig but then I do tend to move toward some ‘cartoony’ ways with a lot of these characters when I animate. (breaking the joints etc.) Perhaps for a more realstic rig this would be more appropriate? Or am I totally wrong here?

#18

one approach I’ve seen is to have a gradient or ramp ease-off on the joints. This way, the knee doesn’t snap to full-extension, but begins curving off more-an-more as it approaches this value. In addition, the joint should be able to be manually broken to the other side, and this “0” ramp still functions.

#19

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