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Hellooo!
I've made a rig in Blender 2.5 which is the pre Beta release of the next version of Blender.
Blender 2.5 already has some great functionality, especially the animation tools.
So I've used some of them to make a rig. Here it is.
I'll explain the controls. This is the foot control. Press g to grab it and move the foot around.
This is the foot roll control.
Pull up to rotate the foot forwards around the ball of the foot or down to rotate back around the heel.
This is really useful for walk cycles.
Next is the foot tumble control.
Pull in to rotate the foot around a pivot on the inside and pull out to rotate the foot around a different pivot on the outside of the foot.
This next control allows you to pivot around the tip toe. Up and from side to side.
You can select a control and then hide the scene layer that the armature is on.
Now when you press g to move the control, you can see the effect on the mesh more clearly.
Next is the knee control. The knee always tries to point towards this control.
Next is the Inverse Kinematic (IK) control for the hand.
It works similarly to the foot control.
For the hand you have a grab control. Pull it back and forth to make the hand curl.
You can also grab and rotate the thumb.
Here I've hidden the rig's layer so we can see the mesh better.
This is the hip control. The spine is independent from it.
This is a simple 3 bone spine. Using Forward Kinematics (FK).
More complicated spine rigs exist. But I'm not sure if they're really worth the effort. This one is fine.
It's easy to control.
This is the neck.
Here are the shoulder controls.
You can grab or rotate them.
If you select a rotatable control and press r once, it rotates around the view vector.
Like this.
If you want to rotate sideways with respect to the view, press r twice.
This gives you track ball rotation.
He's in a really weird position... never mind : )
Here's the eyeball control. Press r twice for trackball rotation.
There's just one eyeball control. This rig is a work in progress, so I should improve this.
The facial controls are less complete than the rest of the rig.
For the face, there's just the head, the eye and next the jaw control.
Press r twice again to use trackball rotation on it.
He has 3 expressions: passive, awestruck and flabbergasted : )
Silence (thinking time : )
This is the elbow control. It's similar to the knee control.
Now I'll show you how to switch between the IK and FK controls.
IK mean Inverse Kinematics. FK means Forward Kinematics.
All the IK controls are yellow. All the FK controls are purple.
With FK, rotations propagate down hierarchies. Like you saw with the spine.
With Inverse Kinematics, you set the end position of a hierarchy and the other bones rotate to meet that target.
IK is how we controlled the legs and arms.
There are also FK controls for the arms and legs.
You can make them visible in the armature panel, using the armature layers.
The legs are on the first two layer, and the arms are one the second two layers.
Legs: layer 1 = IK, layer 2 = FK Arms: layer 3 = IK, layer 4 = FK
Now you can see the purple Forward Kinematics leg controls.
You can see they behave differently to the IK controls we used earlier.
Currently the mesh is associated to the IK controls.
To switch it to the FK controls, use this IK/FK switcher control here.
To switch it to the FK controls, use this IK/FK switcher control here.
Pull up on this control to switch the leg part of the mesh to the FK controls.
In the middle you can see the deforming bones.
On the right you can see the IK bones and on the left you can see the FK bones.
I've switched the leg to the FK bones now. He's doing some sort of high kick.
There is similar IK/FK switcher control for each of the arms as well.
We'll make the arms' IK armature layer visible and the arms' FK armature layer visible.
To switch the right arm to FK, I grabbed the IK/FK switcher and pulled it up.
Now we can grab the purple FK arm controls and make him wave.
The FK arms have got their own grab control.
I've used b-bones (bendy blender bezier bones) to make the rotations graduate down the lower arms.
You can see the purple segments twisting nicely.
The forearm still looses some volume, but that's because the mesh doesn't have enough edge loops in that region. My bad.
You can get this rig from a link in the information beside the video. (You'll have to sign up to the blender artist forum.)
There's also a link to where you can get builds of Blender 2.5. The site is called graphicall.com
So join in with Blender 2.5 development! You can help by finding bugs. It's already a really fun program to work with.
This text here (in blender) is just info about how to work the rig. The same info as in this video incase you need a refresher.
Sooo, thanks for watching! I hope you like the rig, and Happy Blendering! See ya later : )