I have an imported game skeleton that doesnt use the same bone type as making a skeleton from scratch. The bones aren’t connected at all, theyre just parented to each other.
Unfortunately all the ik rig and animating tutorials use the regular bone structure, and this one doesnt seem to work with all the tips they mention. Is there anyway I can make this skeleton like the regular blender rigs while keeping its rigging the same?
Im not sure what you need but bones do not need to be connected.
yes, but i was following this tutorial and most of the ik steps done apply to mine since most of the bones are different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yiC6pEQMAw
when doing the ik helper bones, most of the skeleton becomes distorted, even after follwing the tutorials steps.
so i was wondering if theres anyway to make a proper blender ik rig for this kind of skeleton, since ive been unable to find any kind of tutorials on it.
I’m sure there is, but it would really help if I saw the rig so I know exactly what you are working with. Without seeing the rig, it would just be a guessing game. Your screen shot is just showing me a bunch of circles connected by what blender calls ‘relationship lines’. I assume the circles are the base of the bones, and the relationship lines would be what in a normal blender rig would be the bone. The tip of a blender bone would be at the next circle for the next bone in the chain.
Since this is from a game engine, have you looked for any other blender users that work with the same game engine?
Can you post the raw rig as you imported it into blender? Then I could take a look at it. Also, does any animation data import into blender as well?
So post something up, and I’ll take a look at it…
Randy
Indeed, it is quite common for some bones to be not-connected to anything else … say, if the purpose of those bones is to be a “control knob” that’s used to drive other parts of the animation.
In one project that I’m working-on right now, for example, there’s a “face-control bone” whose only actual purpose is to drive the change of expression in the model’s face. In the “zero, zero zero” position, the expression is neutral. Tilt the bone up on the Y-axis, for example, and “Sarah smiles.” Bend it down and she frowns; to one side and she scowls; to the other and she opens her mouth in shock; twist it and her eyebrows arch from one side to the other; and so on and on. As this (invisible) bone is animated, the model’s expression changes smoothly from one expression to another, all as dictated by drivers and keys. The bone is entirely off-camera and in fact is some distance away from the other (connected …) bones which control the model’s pose.
(In fact, the various control-bone movements aforementioned are each expressed as individual actions, so that the entire performance is ultimately specified in the NLA Editor. But, that’s another story for another time.)
sorry that it took so long, but heres a save of a type of model that uses the same skeleton set up.
scout.blend (1.78 MB)
using things like pole targets in the ik menu seems to always contort the body in weird ways, which doesnt happen in ik tutorials ive seen.
Hmm. That is an odd looking rig.
Could you explain what you want to do with the rig? Are you looking to export it back out, or do you just want to create some animation inside blender?
Is there any reason you do not want to use Rigify to generate a new rig for this mesh?
Honestly, I don’t see any reasons to keep this rig intact. It is a forward kinematics only rig with poor bending. Rigify and automatic weights will give you better results in a few minutes.
Ok, looked at the file, all those dots are actually very tiny bones. If you select one and press ‘.’ on the numpad to zoom in on one (and change the armature display to octahedral) you can see them. I guess it doesn’t matter how long a bone is. Looking at the upper arm bone ‘bip_upperArm_L’ it’s just a tiny dot, but the relationship line extends down to the next bone in the arm, ‘bip_lowerArm_L’. So it doesn’t matter if you have small bones like this, or larger bones like most us blender users are used to seeing, they will still work the same. Small or big bone, they act the same, rotate the ‘bip_upperArm_L’ bone around, it’s children bones rotate along with it, and the mesh moves. But the size will matter when it comes time to work with this rig, like adding in ik constraints. Then the small size will just be confusing.
Not really sure what you’re end goal is here… If you want to animate this rig in blender, using blender’s IK & stuff like that, then it’d be a lot of work. And I mean a ton of work. If it were me doing this, I’d create an entire 2nd rig, a ‘normal’ blender rig. That would be a job in itself, because you’d have to locate each bone exactly where that rig’s bones are. You have to locate the upper arm bone’s root, of your new rig, at the root of that rig’s upper arm bone. Then the tip of your new bone would need to be positioned at the root of the lower arm bone. Hurts my brain just to think about all that work… Then there are a few other things to figure out, like why is there 2 forearm bones? I assume it’s for forearm twist, but it’s more work.
After creating a normal blender rig, you’d add all the ik stuff you want to the blender rig. Now you got an easy to animate blender rig, and use the game engine rig as a ‘shadow’ rig. You’d constrain all of it’s bones to match the animated bones of the blender rig. The game engine rig would now copy all the movement of the blender rig. Now you could animate the blender rig, and the game engine rig will follow along nicely, but it won’t have any animation data, because it’s only copying the blender rig. So for every key frame of the blender rig, you’d have to insert ‘visual’ key frames for all the bones in the game engine rig. More work…
Then how does this all work? You’ve imported a rig & character, can the importer bring in animation data as well? Import/export should be a 2 way street, if you can import that data into blender, then you should be able to export it back out… IDK…
So what game engine is this for? Maybe someone has already done this with blender before.
Randy
this is from the source engine by valve software. and my only goal was to animate in blender, not to export them out back into the engine.
