finger rigging with David Rogers' instructions

#1

Hey,
I’m trying to follow the 2002 Complete Guide by David Rogers instructions on rigging my character’s hands. I followed his instructions on rigging the rest of the body and had no difficulty at all. However, I’m getting some odd behavior while doing the fingers.

I’m at the part where I apply a smart skin to the finger in order to use the z-axis rotation of the finger control bone to make the finger bend. The weird behavior starts when I try to move a finger bone in order to place it in the bent position. It starts to move, then suddenly scales to a smaller size, moves back to its original position and then is completely stuck. I can select the bone but can’t move it.

Has anyone else come across this sort of weird bone behavior while applying smartskin?

I’m using AM 10.5a, on a pentium 4 machine.

#2

:eek:

boy that’s some weird behavior… first guess is that there is some kind of constraint on the hand somewhere. if so turn off the pose that has it before creating the smartskin.

Have you tried using the rotate manipulator? select the bone and hit ‘r’ to bring the manipulator up and rotate the bone with that. this will produce, among other things FK behavior.

Hope that helps some, but I’ve never seen a bone behave that way.

-David Rogers

#3

Hi David,

Yes, very strange behavior. I figured out that if I set the smartskin on one finger, and then completely shut down AM I can do another finger. But I had to shut down between each finger. As that was taking a while I only got one hand done. :hmm:

Thanks for your tip about the rotation manipulator. I’ll try that for the other hand.

Sean

ps-thanks for the great work in the “complete guide”. I find it very easy to follow and your rigging process made me realize that I was avoiding rigging my own models for no reason.

#4

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