I’ve done every thing twice tonight…arfgh! Good thing I save so often…
here is my first blender model…it’s craptastic and I had a blast with it.
I really like how lively the character feels which is my favorite part of the Burton animations.
Thanks so much, I’m glad you can feel him. I really want to bring my pupet to life …seeing him come to life…that’s my dream.
03\26/14, File Devon_06_033_test for_001.blend
So I’ve been re-building my rig with lots of video imput from as always, David Ward and Jonathan Williams. You might get sick of hearing about these guru’s but damn they are the only reason I’ve gotten this far.
Well I say rebuild, but mostly I try stuff, it breaks I go back to an earlier version…(I save constantly) and redo what I had just spent an hour doing…but doing a little better each time.
Hair pulling tedium for the most part. I must love the pain is all I can figure.
So I did a pose animation by eye. Just a very quick and rough test to see how well the rig is working and to find problems. just an eye measure…no other checks or ghost or any other cad stuff. Just a pose, render viewport, save, next pose, render viewport…etc.
I’ve gotten the rig to do some really fun things thanks to those guru’s video. I would have never gotten this stuff without them. Making the character move about sorta makes up for all the pain it takes to get there.
This is a very crude animation, I really did this just to see how it would come out…
I wish they allowed gif’s here…that was what I was planning to load…but they are not a valid file acording to the file manager. 
This rig has some real niffty features, I like the hand follow driver that gets controlled by the influence.
I fixed the collar bone problem…mostly.
The hands seem to work.
Getting the bones to all align and work is very very hard. The displayed axis and the normal axis display shown by the widget don’t agree visually, once you mirror the left to the right …you are in a whole world of pain. I’ve gone over this rig slowly and I’m not even close to something that I can use to animate with. Its a slow step, back two steps…etc.
I’m so new and slow at this. its very time consuming and not really all that fun…thank god other folk have talked about how this is just how it is. It takes time to set all this up. LOTS OF TIME. At least for now anyway.
I’ve thought about how long it would take me to produce a real life armature that you could film in stop motion. I don’t think I’d even know how to star.
A final look at the torso bending without the rig showing. Somehow I think of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ LOL
The Rig
I show the bones in the ‘B-Bone’ Display. I’ve scaled them done to be able to see the rig clearly and easily at a glance. Thats my theory anyway.
A lot of what you see comes from the clever ideas of the tutorial videos. They make it look easy but I find problems since this is a hybrid of different ideas that I liked.
The spine, neck and forearm get extra segments to give it that ability to bend better.
end of the work for today,
This is looking pretty cool! keep it up! One little detail that bothers me though, You have a little pole in your hand’s topology where 6 edges intersect, be careful with that, it can lead to weird deformations when using Sub-surfaces.
Other than that I love it!
Wow, well spoted, I did not notice. I’ll squash that bug right away…
Thanks for your kind words and the help. It really helps to have feedback.
-J
You may be new, but you’re already a much better rigger and character modeller than me (Used Blender for 3 years now, and still struggle to model and rig a decent character). The rig has come out well, the body is deforming quite nicely! You’ve nailed most of the hard parts. From what I can see, the topology looks good as well…
So nice to hear from you! Thanks for your very nice words 
I admire your work so much. Your film work…is really impressive. Do you do all that by yourself? Every time I think of your movie poster, it makes me laugh…your design is just brilliant!
03/27/14, File: 06_036.blend
Leg Rigging
I found the deformation around the pelvis and the upper leg bone to be bad…really bad. So I hope I have fixed it.
Now I’m only working with body and that is sort of a mistake since I need to have the pants do my corrected deform for that upper leg joint.
Short cuts for today:
I love shortcuts, they are cool and of course 'faster’ctrl R : rotate the bone (editmode)
------I don’t know how i missed that one, I really really looked for it, now I feel dumb, my current video named it right at the very beginning.
NOTE: New Shortcuts added
POSEMODE
ctrl shift alt A ; Clear All Transforms
EDITMODE
ctrl F1 : switch to object mode
1 : vertex select
2 : edge select
3 : face select
[INDENT=2]a nice way to change my select mode without using ctrl tab, which i find slows down my work flow.
[/INDENT]
To create a good joint:
I put the two joint close to each other then I bend one while in posemode, I can then paint the weights of the unbent mesh. Then with x axis mirror on I can see how my weight will affect the bending deform for that joint.
It then is easy to see how my subsurf mesh is acting with my current weight for the bones. In my picture I show the finished bend for the upper leg and the pelvic. I wanted the rear pelvic mesh to deform with a nice even spread of the mesh for the rear, while the front would compress and form a fold.
This might not be the correct or best way to go but Its all I can do for the moment. Any other ideas for this?
Some of what I post is to remind me of what I did and learned. :)
I took 2 hours to check the fingers and the bend deformations. I am pretty noobish on the whole weight and bend thing. This is the best I can do so far. I plan to stop here and move on to the getting the other stuff done.
Most of that time went to making sure the x axis bend was consistant for all fingers and the thumbs. That took too long, mostly 'cause I don’t know what I’m doing.
NEXT UP:
Finish the leg bones ik, get the clothes on the armature and fine tune the weights.
I wonder if the clothes contraint would help? Not sure of that part, only seen a few hints about it.
-j
03/29/14 Devon_06_042.Blend
Shirt, Vest, Tie, origin to center of chest,
All else at bottom center.
The new rig is working well. Its been a bang your head against the wall in a pleasant way experience. I am glad I did the digging, I really understand how to use the riggify much better. I’ll most likely use that rig for biped work. I feel much more confident in the armature work.
A view of the foot rig I ended up using, that part of the work caused me the most problems and therefore gave up the most knowledge…
I messed up a parent child from the foot to the lower leg bone. That was a 'bone’head thing to do. 
I have been working on his smile…
Much harder than I thought to get a good one.
Still not happy with my results…I will come back to this later…
Do you have trouble with smiles…or is it just me.
I just updated to 6.70, updates always scare me cause I always wonder what they broke during the change…
… you seem to be like walking with giant steps regarding the progress of your work - awesome!
read something about motion-capturing with kinect or similar motion detection systems some time ago. as these systems are more and more affordable for home use, it will be a lot easier to animate characters in the future. so the rigging skills you’re developing are a good bedrock for things to come.
^^ The expressions look great. Starting to see the character’s personality better here. In one of the side views, where he’s thinking, the eyeball doesn’t seem to be connecting with the top eyelid…
Smiles are a pain to get right, but from what I can see from the previews so far, it looks pretty good!
Thanks a lot, haha I don’t do any of the characters myself, I re-used the Cookie Flex Rig from CGCookie. It would have been a pain if I had to create all of them myself…
I keep going back to the facial smiles…since I keep failing at them. This is my latest, which I think is better.
The edge artifacts around the upper eye, I think are low res glitches. These are not animation…well they are but they are just me doing single renders quickly. I need to see how they look moving.
I keep making one step forward and three back. I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve deleted all my shape keys and started over from scratch.
I will have to say that it makes my heart sing to see him have some life. Sometimes I just stare and think how cool this blender really is.
I am fixing the eye close with the lower eyelids, always something to tweak…slow steps and baby steps
Eye Blink Work today:
![[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/ciT7yUc.gif](http://imgur.com/ciT7yUc)
nice… didn’t expect spheres as eyelids looking this good. rejected using spheres because of the trouble rotating them correctly having the intersection of upper and lower sphere exactly in the corner of the eye like the closing point of the eyelids at first pic. however its just a matter of taste. the closing point at first pic looks more exactly and i would expect the lower eyelid moving up a little bit to close over the eyeball. but regarding the fast movement of the eyelid, it doesn’t matter at all because its hard to see. how does it look from 45°?
So all the facial got redone…one last gif of the new facial shape keys…really I mean it this time. Seriously this is the last one, cross my heart, stab me with a blender if I don’t Mr. crapy butler…oh wait…that is from black adder. Never Mind.
![[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/yDTdj07.gif](http://imgur.com/yDTdj07)
It took me a while to figure out this eye lid thingy. I knew it would work…I stole that technique from the Corpse Bride. I did find that if my lower lid was set up to receive…it would all work…somehow. I couldn’t use the shape keys for the upper eye…cause of the whole, theose verts only move straight, so they are on a rotating bone…duh!, if you only knew how long I struggled…the wind…the mountains…the…
…well it was tough anyway.
But like you said, its blinky fast…most folk will never ever see it. Blah.
I’m tired and punchy. Can you tell>?
from a 45? I’ve no idea…
Just a tad more…
![[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/5Pchr9k.gif](http://imgur.com/5Pchr9k)
Awesome stuff!