Moho Forum

A rig is an armature, an assembly made for the purpose of moving a character around. Usually like a skeleton. In this program, they're made with bones.

Holy cow this is a lot of work... but tons of fun.

I recently came up with the perfect rock solid solution for flipping layers based on a bones position. Rasheed's FlipByBones worked but it conflicted with my other scripts and created key frames on the layers which I didn't want to deal with.

My new solution doesn't create any keyframes for layer translation so you don't have to worry about deleting keys or anything like that.

This is a sample animation of the body rig.

http://www.lowrestv.com/character_rig/C ... y_rig4.mov


You can turn it side to side using a single bone. Arm and leg layers "flip" to the front and back. At the moment the forearms are separate layers that I keyed by hand to keep them in front, however I plan to add in a bone control "switch" that can be used to flip the forearms and hands up and down in layer order. So the whole arm can be behind the body and then you could flip the forearm to the top if needed. Very cool.

I sort of created a "cage" of bones for the body turn deformation. This should work well for creating different clothes for the characters.

Not sure if I will put in the "autoscaling" limb controls. I would like to be able to drag the arms around using one or two bones. Have to see how hard this will be to implement. I've been working on it.

Still need to work on the hip area. That one is tricky with the legs flipping and sort of moving "up and down" slightly. Almost have it worked out. Next will be to finish the shoulders and all the fan bones for the joints.

The best thing is that darn layer flipping script. That is kick arse. I can go back to my original style. I can put in a lot more details I left out because it wasn't working. I can do hair now very easily, cheek bone details... all that cool stuff. Layer flipping RULES!

Closing in on a finished version. No date set yet for completion though.

-vern

I think you're close to perfect 2,5D rig....

I have made a quick read of your post and I don't understand the new concept:

I sort of created a "cage" of bones for the body turn deformation. This should work well for creating different clothes for the characters.

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I'm working now in redraw the "DE" model (yes the crashing one) to be 3D rigged with springy mechanism. The shapes will be very simple but I'll try to make a complete side to side body-head turn.
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Can you post a screenshot and a layer hierarchy shot of the body (not the head please!) with the bones involved in the animation???

Great job!

Genete

The "cage" is a series of bones in the general shape of the torso. I am using a combination of your springy bone system and a NEW scale control through scripting to distort the torso.

I linked the X translation of a bone to the scale value of two bones, left and right master scale bones. When the master bone is pushed to one side or the other of another bone the scale of these bones are reversed.

I use scale constraints targeted to the left and right master scale bones at different values on bones in the body for some fake "3D" distortion. That is how I distort the chest as it turns.

Know I that translation can be linked to bone scaling. I should be able to adapt this for moving the arms around in "2.5D" space.

Imagine dragging a bone around... as it moves another bone will squash and stretch and rotate to follow the control bone. This is how I want to control animation of the arms and legs.

Instead of rotating the forearm you would drag the "hand" bone to move the forearm. Then drag the "elbow" bone to move the bicep.

I may use some elements of that new thing you did recently... that rotating ... shape... gizmo. I don't know what to call it.

Will post a screen grab when I get a chance. It's kind of a mess right now... there are all these temporary "test" bones all over the place as I tried to figure out some of the tricky spots like the shoulder and hips.

What really bugs me now is that I've figured out a lot of things recently that would have made my face rig easier to do. I am going to implement the bone scaling trick to "squish" the eyes as they turn around the head... that was bugging me a little.

-vern

Here's a screen grab:



Some of those bones aren't being used. The shoulder bones are a total mess right now.

The thighs are children of the last bone in the leg rotation "gizmo" and the gizmo is a child of the hips (just like the arms gizmo).

The up/down motion of the legs came up as a result of how the character would be viewed. You sort of look "down" at his feet. So the leg closest to the viewer would appear slightly lower than the back leg due to perspective. If those bones on the tip of the spring were exactly on the end there is a perfectly straight line of motion. By slightly offsetting the tips of the springy bone gizmo the legs move up and down as they turn.

I wanted to use constraints to control the arms and legs but for some reason the rotatetrans/transrotate scripts absolutely will not work with this file. I have to make the arms and legs children of the rotating bones. Kind of a pain.

The script works. The targeted bones move correctly with the script but the mesh stops being influenced by the bones. It is like the script causes bone influence to stop somehow. It is very strange and I have no idea why.

To be honest those scripts always had this problem with my rig. I think it has to do with the complex bone hierarchy. Till I figure it out it works fine this way.

-vern

Love to see that the springy bones (those little gizmo you called) helped you with the body turn!