In this tutorial, I go over a basic-to-intermediate rig for the alien character. The rig covers only the body; I went over the facial rig in a previous tutorial. I show how to do the full setup on the left half (creating and placing bones, and also applying constraints), and copy it over to the right side for a perfectly symmetrical rig. Most of the features in 2.5 are the same, however, the keyboard shortcuts and a few menu items have been moved around, but I show you where they are.
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- .blend file at the state of the tutorial
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I will get to watching your ever clear tutorial on this one but have to congratulate you on the title for the tutorial. Sounds like it could be the title of a ‘Sting’ song – “Rigging and Alien in New York” – just made me chuckle
very good this tuto … so I have a question, why you do not use a controller of the elbow?
most models use this system, I think it gets more resources and easier to animate the character, you could show how you can add a controller of the elbow?
again congratulations on video tuto
Dave just a little tip. When you first loaded your alien scene there was no need to append your file. when you open a blend file from 2.49 there is a little check box which you can uncheck called load ui.Unchecking this box will allow you to keep the blender 2.5 layout.
thanks chris. guess i need to open my eyes a bit
Hi! Your tutorials are great
. This one is great, but i can not find “inherit rotation” in blender 2.49. do you know where it is?
Thanks, really nice tutorial David
I’ve learned a lot of thing in this tutorial as the facial rig but in “the new way”.
Sounds like you’ll love the final 2.5’s features of animating.
I’m waiting the next one
Another awesome tutorial David
Although, I’m trying to do an animation and a problem that I’m having is making a realistic environment. Can you make a tutorial on that?
i made one for my youtube channel a couple of weeks ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAaCz10WLDg
Cool tutorial. It’s nice to discover rigging with 2.5. Looking forward to the next tut. Thanks.
Bernard
Awesome tutorial David, very good explanation !! Thanks blendercookie.
Wow, amazing tutorial! If only I’d known about the automatic weights sooner, though. xD I’m really looking forward to the actions constraint segment as well! Also, I’m not sure how far you want to take this, but is there any chance we’ll see you make a walk cycle for the li’l green fella? =) And as always, I am left with a question or two.
When you had the chainlength on the forearm set to 3, would it have been possible to limit the influence of the IK-chain on the shoulder blade, without affecting the influence of the first 2 chain-parts?
Also, is there a specific reason you placed the Subsurf on top of the modifier stack? =)
Thanks,
Patrick
yeah, i’ll be doing a walk cycle, and some basic animations along with it.
to answer your questions:
1. i’m not aware of a way to edit the influence on the individual bones in the chain; not to say there’s NOT a way, i just don’t know of it.
2. when modeling, subsurf is usually one of the first things i apply (aside from the mirror), so that’s just the chronological order it was placed in
Cool, I can’t wait. =) Thanks for your answers as well, I’ll go look into the bone influence thing sometime soon. =P
Nice tutorial, I’m really loving this Alien series!
I took a time to found the X-mirror too
This has been the most detailed tutorial I’ve seen on body rigging so far and I enjoyed it very much although some parts of it were a bit hard to get a grasp of for me but that’s just because I’ve never really looked into animation too much yet. Thumbs up for the alien series and looking forward to the next part. Thanks David.
Hey David, Thanks alot for this rigging tutorial. i’m just getting into rigging and this was just perfect.
I just submitted my comment, and now I have to restart the video. Maybe this should be taken into consideration for the site =). or not.
wait tutorial Alien Walking
Thanks
Great tut bud, in the begining you had the “2.49 interface problem” instead of appending the file, you can open it, and at the left there is a Load UI check… uncheck it. SHAZAAAAM!
Can you make this video public on Vimeo? I always see “The creator of this video has not given you permission to embed it on this domain” when I try to watch it directly on this page, so I have to watch it on Vimeo.
Ooops – done.
Hi! nice tutorial
You can actualy see the individual bone axis but not in object mode (in the object mode you can see the axis of the object wich I think it’s the dot not the actual bones) in blender 2.49 is in “editing mode” – F9 // in the buttons menu or window // and in 2.5 I think it’s in Object data (under where you have changed to b-bone).
P.S. : I am rather new to blender … do you know how can I change the individual bone axis so that the Y axis would be Z ? When you CTRL + R(Set Roll) you rotate the bone on it’s Y axis (at least in 2.49) but I need that axis to be Z .
Some other thing (sorry for 2 comments one after the other but I haven’t watched the entire video when i wrote the other ) if you want to deselect something with box selection (B) I think you need to press Middle Mouse and not Alt. Or I suppose you could have deselcted all (A) and reselect the bones you need (I am talking about the head bone that got selected).
Great tutorial!
I just got one problem. when i applied the automatic weights the eyeball bone moved the mouth ¿Is there a way to fix that?
I’ll answer to myself, what i had to do was use the weight paint to fix my problem.
This is my very first time modleing and rigging a character all is going well but the only problem the mesh doesnt deform well on the left hand compared to the left and the rest of the body.
my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.
very good this tuto … so I have a question, why you do not use a controller of the elbow?
most models use this system, I think it gets more resources and easier to animate the character, you could show how you can add a controller of the elbow?
again congratulations on video tuto