I’ve been trying to work on a short animated piece and have been trying Blender for it. I’m starting from scratch. I have experience with Maya and have used referencing for a production while in College and found it very useful. We would animate our parts and get updates to the rig and model as we worked. However, I can’t seem to find a similar function in Blender.
As I’m starting this short from scratch I really would like to be animating some of the scenes while I’m still working on the models and improving the rigs for specific tasks, so I don’t lose inspiration or time.
The closest things I can find are “appending” and “linking”
Appending, makes a whole copy. Thus, later improvements in the rigs would have to be made manually in each scene.
While Linking has not allowed me to animate or otherwise enter “posemode” for my rigs.
Please help,
Gb
P.S.: most specifically I’m working with the Pitchipoy rig in Blender and am getting these results.
However, I will soon be making some custom rigs and I don’t want the same problem with them either.
You should link your character to the scene and make a proxy of the armature (alt+ctrl+p I think). Then you can animate it and modify things except for the armature afterwards. Note: Make proxy only effects some channels, so if you are using shape keys you’ll have to drive them by bones. Hopefully someone has made a script to setup that.
There is a specific reference system in place for character rigs. You can do exactly this in Blender and it works very well. However it’s not quite the same as in Maya because although you can manipulate the armature normally, you lose access to many of the other separate elements of the rig if you might need them for the animation. But there are work arounds.
First you have to group everything in the rig’s scene file that is related to the rig. Just before you do this however put anything you might want hidden in your animation scene into separate layers.
This should include your control widget bones too because you will need to ( proxy ) them later and don’t want them duplicated.
Name the group My…Rig Group whatever.
The group will have it’s own layers visibility panel. This will effect what’s seen in the viewport when you link the group across. You should tick off the layers there you don’t want visible when it’s referenced across. All the group info is available in all of the grouped objects own object panels on the right hand side of the screen.
Next open a new scene. Then go to link, and find the group folder with your rig group in your rig’s scene file. Bring the group across. It will appear in the scene as a self contained group object. A perfect reference of your original rig, but you won’t be able to effect it.
Next click on the group object. Scroll down the object menu in the bottom toolbar and pick ( Make Proxy ) Choose the armature object of your rig to make it a proxy in the scene, and you have a controllable referenced character.
There are a few more details worth knowing about so it would be good to track down a good tutorial like Nathan Vegdahls Humane Rigging DVD, but that’s the basic process.
You can’t effect the separate elements though like in Maya. So if you have a low poly tin can proxy version for instance, or hair you want to turn on and off it’s not so easy. But the way around this is to have a driver on a bone ( Ideally the root) control visibility and other settings for proxy meshes or hair or anything else you might need.
Hope I got all that right. It’s a bit late here in London. This should set you on your way at least to search the net with the right questions should you need more detail.
