I had some trouble with the shoulders too. I repositioned the metarig and regenerated a new rig for your mesh. There where a few other minor problems that I addressed as well. The neck bone needed to be a bit longer. The hips needed to be a bit longer and go to the base of the crotch. The collar bone was not quite long enough and the upper arm needed to be moved out a bit.
With that done I did some weightpainting. I had trouble with the shoulders, so I needed to to a little bit of retopology. Also, there were tris in the crotch area. I made everything down there quads. (You owe me big for the crotch help!.
I would like to see you finish the feet on the main body and even out some of the quads throughout the mesh. (I would not bother with toes. Just make some stocking feet.) After that, we can start tackling the clothing issue. I have another trick up my sleeve for that.
I moved all of the clothing to layer two. Just enable that layer if you don’t want to be naked.
I have an eleven hour day tomorrow (and the next four days), so I’m not sure when I can get back at this. Please post when you get the feet done.
Hi DanPro Attached is the file with added feet. Im not going to mess with it so we are both singing off the same song sheet. Ill start playing with my scenes etc till we talk again. Many thanks for all your work.
Hi DanPro Attached is the file with added feet. Im not going to mess with it so we are both singing off the same song sheet. Ill start playing with my scenes etc till we talk again. Many thanks for all your work.
Awesome! We are getting real close. I want to do a little more weight painting and maybe some other minor topology work.
We will be using parts of the body mesh and duplicating them to make some “deform cages” for the clothing. That’s why this step is so important. When the body mesh is good, the deform cages will work perfectly, because they will be identical meshes, just scaled up a bit.
I’ll try to post something tonight or early morning before work of the “final” body mesh. The next step we should be able to divide and conquer. I know you have been itching to get at that facial rig.
Try to break things. Move every limb and joint and see if you are happy with this. I did transfer the weights to the clothing and it’s working OK. They could use some minor tweaks here and there.
Let me know if you see any issues.
Test, test test! Let’s make sure we have this as good as we can get it. (Not worried about the clothes, just the main body.)
Yo DanPro another genius strike. I have noticed some things that I am a little confused with.
Whats a deform cage?
when I move the arms up could we get the collar bone to move up to help the deform
I have also noticed that the finger controllers move the fingers but I have seen a tutorial where a guy created a Tim Burton style character and when he moved the finger controllers his fingers didnt just move they bent the finger too. Any ideas why my characters fingers dont bend
You wouldnt have noticed the next problem because it has to do with the UV on the hair and eyebrows, you may be able to help with this too. The hair supposed to look like reel hair but the edges have a white colour instead of being transparent and blending into the skin UV I hope you get what I mean.
How long have you been working with Blender? just wondering how long it would take to get to your level of expertese
Thanks again…some how Im gonna have to send you a bottle of your favourite tipple for all your help. Or maybe a case at this rate. LOL
I have not used a “deform cage” in your file yet. We will be getting to that soon , though. It’s an alternate way of moving a mesh. Bones move a mesh from the inside out, a deform cage will move it from the outside in. It’s a good way of rigging clothing.
It’s humanly impossible to move your arm up past the “T-Pose” position without getting your collar bone involved. I just make a habit of grabbing that controller when I reach that point with my arm movements. We could make it automatic, but I think that is wasted effort and can often work against us as animators. We would have to counter that automation as much as it would help in most cases. It’s a trade off, but one I think should be left as is.
I think I’ve gotten the best I can get with weightpainting on the shoulders. The next step would be to use a corrective shapekey.
Rigify has one main control for the fingers. It will rotate the fist digit only. However, if you scale the controller, the last two digits will curl up and down. The control uses an action constraint to do this. Try it out.
In addition to the main control, there are finger “tweak” controls on a different layer (to the right of the fingers layer). These will allow you to rotate any digit individually.
Sadly, rigging and animation are my only strengths, at this point. UV’s, compositing, nodes, rendering, etc are all things I need to learn more about. There are other forums sections dedicated to those areas. I’d ask there. Soory I could not be more helpful with this.
I have been using Blender for about two years. I went back and forth from some other programs and always came back to blender because of huge amount of options. It’s not always easy to learn new features, but it’s always worthwhile once you have.
I’m not sure if I mentioned this, but, I want to recommend getting a copy of the Blender Animation Toolkit from CGCookie.com. Some of the issues you are running into now have more to do with using the rig and animation tools. That tutorial will give you a huge amount of info and a huge leg up on your knowledge base.
I can’t recommend this enough. Awesome course from some great animators. Nathan is the author of Rigify, btw. Who better to learn from? Beorn has worked on many Blender projects as well as some feature film. His lip-sync tutorial is gold.
Took your advice and purchased the toolkit and learning loads. The flexirig is a brilliant idea and will try and use it as much as possible. Wish I had spotted it earlier but definately going to help. Ive tried not to mess about with my charatcer too much but did get some sound advice from another user about my UVs which pointed me in the right direction. Now all i need to do is get done with this Dreaded weight painting stuff so i can get on with…yes the facial rig. LOL LOL you know how much i am looking forward to it. Hope you didnt work too hard this week, had the same problem myself unfortunately, but working on this character in my sleep as well i think.
I was pretty happy with the weight painting on the last upload. If you see anything out of place, let me know. I’ll look it over again.
I was going to suggest that you apply the mirror modifier so we can get to the next step, which is shapekeys and creating the deform cages for the clothing. You know, the good stuff.
applied the mirror mods and just added some teeth which wasnt on it before…guess what… they dont move properly, shock!
Cant find anything wrong for it so far just the clothing which is our next step. I did notice that on the flexirig they had different colours for the left and right side of the character. I know I have seen it somewhere on my many many tutorials but cant find out how to change them.
At least I know the difference between FK and IK and how to use them properly now. Really gettin excited about starting the animation process and doin some serious funnies for my grandson to check out. Thanks again
Yo DanPro
How you doin. Been workin on a few bits on my character and think i got the teeth to move better now. Gonna look at the facial rig again soon, get a few bones for the eyes etc. Just wondering how your getting on with the last file I sent you. KNow your probably busy so just give me a shout so I know when we can get to the next stage…the good stuff LOL
I made a quick deform cage for your clothing (shirts), added some custom colors to your bones, and fixed the teeth issue.
Sorry for the silence. The kids came down with strep and a long work week took up most of my free time. I’ll post something later tonight. I want to write something up about the deform cage so you understand how it works and how you can replicate it.
OK, it was not Pasteall’s problem. For some reason the file got bloated to 60 megs. I had to remake the deform cage and do some modeling work on the hi vis jacket and the shirt.
I think at this point I am going to step back and hand the whole thing back to you. we have a working basemesh with working clothing.
The rest you should be able to handle.
I’ll still be here if you need a hand, but sending a huge file back and forth is not something I want to do daily. I still need to write up how the deform cage works, but that will have to wait for a latter day.
This file does not include the fix for the teeth, but I covered that in an earlier post. I’m sure you can handle it from here.
