Pivot vs dagger in the solar plexus

[Jkoseattle]

Watching lots of tutorials. Of course the vast majority are based on an older version of ASP. Not a problem most times, but recently I have been looking at videos about rigging. They mostly start with putting a bone in the character's gut that serves as some sort of confusing anchor. In my version, there is this pivot bone thing. I'm still really shaky with bones, and am wondering if this circular pivot bone serves the same purpose as the stationary gut bones in the tutorials. I'm assuming the pivot bone is a Moho enhancement introduced after the tutorials were made, and so every time I see a dagger in the character's gut I should think pivot bones. Yes?

[synthsin75]

That's just the root bone for the whole skeleton. It's usually used to translate the character around or rise and fall for walk cycles, etc.. Many people like to put this root bone where the character's feet meet the ground, but it's all personal preference.

[Jkoseattle]

Ok, so why don't any tutorials have them? And do I still need the dagger bones?

[synthsin75]

Like I said, personal preference. If you're happy controlling everything with like the hip bone as root, that works. I actually like to have a chain of two root bones. The real root for translation and its immediate child for rise and fall, etc..

[Greenlaw]

I'm not sure what you mean by pivot vs. dagger bones. There are two bone types: Bones and Pin bones.

For most rigging, you just use Bones. As Wes mentioned, the root bone you described is for translating the entire rig. You can use this to move the character anywhere on the screen. Sometimes I'll attach my SBD controls to this bone so they move with the characters. (You'll probably want to use a second parent for the SBD and use Independent Angle on that so the controls don't 'flip around' if the character's root is rotated.) In most cases, you will not parent the feet's goal bones to the Root. This allows you to keep the feet 'locked' to the ground. You might also want to enable Independent Rotation to the feet bones so the IK doesn't rotate them unnaturally when you move the body.

If you wish to move the goals along with the rig, you may even want to parent all three bones to a 'Master' bone...or you can just translate the bones layer. Normally, though, you would animate the goal bones independently of the root bone.

I'm going to go off an a little tangent here: I don't normally have goals for the arms--IK for arms is usually easier to animate without goals. However, I will sometimes use arm goals if I need to pin the hands to the hips or something else in the scene. In this case, I like to keyframe the goals' effect so they only come on as I need them.

Back to bone types: Pin bones are new and they're mainly used for warping images kinda like Puppet Pins in After Effects (although they have other uses too as some users are discovering.) Technically, Pin bones are like regular bones except they have zero length and a circular influence.

Apart from Bones for deforming characters, I also like to insert the character's bones layer into additional groups. Each of these groups may have specially positioned pivots for additional transforms. For example, I might have a Squash And Stretch group to add additional, well, squash and stretch (and don't forget shear) effects to the entire rig; in this case, I would place the pivot at the feet of the character. This is mainly for secondary animation effects and should be animated after the main bones animation is all done. If you need to change the bones animation after you've animated these group transforms, it's a good idea to mute these group channels so they don't interfere. After you've edited your bones, then you should unmute these channels and make any necessary changes.

That's probably a lot more info than you wanted but hope it gives you some ideas.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, I forgot to mention one important thing about the Root bone: Normally, this bone should not have any strength applied to it; normally, you shouldn't bind artwork to it either. The Root bone is meant only for moving the rigged character, not for deforming it.

I highly recommend picking apart some of the demo rigs that come with Moho to see how this works, especially from the ASP 10, 11, and Moho 12 content in the Library.

[Jkoseattle]

This is awesome! I have a strict Christmas-themed deadline for this debut project, so I'm not going to get too deep into rigging this time around, but I can't tell you all how excited I've become by this whole animation this I've just discovered. I'm an extremely enthusiastic newbie. When this little humble project is done, you'll probably see more and more complexity as the video plays, because as I learn more I find more things I can do...