Learning to be a TD.

And now the update as to what I have been doing with my weekend. besides your typical yard work, I pushed my knowledge further this weekend in learning how to rig a character. I devoted almost all of my time to the arm as I had a lot to figure out and learn. Taking what I learned from the MMTF class at 3D Buzz and stuff from the net and the Art of Rigging book I finally setteled on a system with an IK/Fk blend, stretchy Ik, and easy to access controls for everything. So let me try and breifly explain the system I used for each of these.

First the IK/FK Blend. First of all I had to learn how important having bones that are properly aligned. I had all kinds of trouble getting the arm to bend in an expected manner until I finally created a linear curve and used it to snap align the joints inbetween the wrist and shoulder (the elbow and forearm) and then the IK finally worked just like I wanted it. then it was a matter of copying the arm twice and using orient and point constraints between the IK arm and the FK arm to the arm that will be visable. This allows a simple blend between the two.

Then there was the problem of making the arm stretchy. I wanted these character to have the ability to go beyond the usual limitations of CG animation. So with the help of a couple of nulls point constrained to the shoulder joint and the IK Wrist controler, a distance between node, condition node, and a multiply divide node, I was able to setup a network that would scale the bones when the controler moved the IK Chain to its maximum and beyond.

And lastly was the most anoying of the problems I had this weekend and that was how to attach controls to control the FK arm chain but still move along with the bones. It sounded simple except for the fact of double transformations. Argh... i know its possible because the files included with the Art of Rigging were doing it, but I could not figure out how they were doing it. But after playing around with it for hours this weekend I finally figured out that if I parented the shoulder controler to a null that I then had the elbow controler parented t0, which allowed me to then orient constrain each bone to its locator and everything worked fine. So I finally ended up with a control curve parented to a null control object parented to yet another null object that o could parent constrain a upstream object. Confused??? I was! And now on to the spine and legs.