Rigging Questions

gnat · Post by **gnat** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 4:20 pm

OK, I'm trying to move past simple image-based animations. I'm pretty comfortable with the tools and tutorials, but am struggling to understand the most usable way of rigging bones.

I have a basic figure here of my dog Pappy. The rigging isn't complete, but I find myself asking several questions about strategy:

- Is nesting bones folders the best way of isolating one set of movements from another? Am I going to be struggling with usability during the animation process?

- When not using nested bone folders, I find myself struggling with the multiple layers and how to selectively attach them to different bones. Do I really have to go layer by layer affixing points/layers to bones, or is there some speedier method that I am not seeing?

- I'm having a little trouble seeing what is causing a bone to control some shape-- bone strength, manually bound points or layers, or some "default" bindings. Is there a better way to see this?

I'm going to go back through the tutorials this weekend, but advice would be very helpful. Or even someone taking a crack at how they might rig this model would be very educational to me.

Thanks,

Gnat

7feet · Post by **7feet** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 7:07 pm

Cute drawing. Sometimes I just have to mess with stuff, and I guess this was one of them.

Pappy3b.anme

So, check out tutorial 3.4. Nested bone layers are sometimes necessary, but not always. In this case I made a master bone layer ("Pappy") which has the body in it, as well as the head layer. That has 2 bones, one controls the overall orientation of the character, and one had the "Head" bone layer bound to it

.

No need to manually bind the points, but I much prefer to use Region Binding over Flexible Binding (go to the Bone layers properties, and select the Bone tab). That's what everything is. The key is to kinda "explode" all the parts you don't want to have interact with each other, and use the Offset Bone tool

to put them back where you want them, but without the bones messing with parts you don't want them to. You still need to play with the bone positions and strength to get everything to work right.

I put a lot of bones in there, but I tend to do that. And I made a quick switch layer for the eyes, but it's too simple. What I would prefer is to have the pupil and eyeshape, along with a separate non-masked switch layer for the eyelids, inside the masking group. But I got lazy, and I didn't want to redraw anything.

gnat · Post by **gnat** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 7:47 pm

Fantastic. I haven't broken down what you've done with the bones, but the animation indicates you have resolved my problems. I look forward to going back through the tutorials too, but somehow this rigging had too many elements to make the translation from the examples I've seen. I've been doodling around very happily with Moho/Anime Studio drawing tools, but the rigging was giving me conniptions.

Thanks,

Gnat

7feet · Post by **7feet** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 9:44 pm

No sweat. One thing to note is that many of the bones are unparented. The bone in the middle of the face is there, mostly, to keep the upper head from wobbling (more a "placeholder" than anything), but I thing pretty much all the unparented bones could be parented to that one.

dekka · Post by **dekka** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 11:14 am

hi guys,
i know it might sound stupid but i do i open this file where do i put it so i can see what you've done with the rigging.
thank you

gnat · Post by **gnat** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 11:22 am

The "*.anme" file extension is the Anime Studio replacement for the old "*.moho" animation file. If you just rename Pappy3b.anme to Pappy3.moho, it looks like you can open it in Moho with no ill effects

Regards,

Gnat

7feet · Post by **7feet** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 11:28 am

Yeah, you can just rename it, the format doesn't seemed to have changed any yet.

dekka · Post by **dekka** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 11:52 am

thank you guys. that's very good work...

Fredoray · Post by **Fredoray** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 11:40 pm

Hope this hasn't been covered elsewhere.... I created a character in pieces in Photoshop, exported via the script and then (I guess) you have to import the pieces one at a time via Image import into a series of layers and position them and add bones... so far that worked pretty well, but you have to highlight each layer separately in order to animate the figure... a little time consuming considering the NAO cahracters and others supplied seem to only have ONE bone layer and you can just click on the arm within the viewer and the bone there is activated.

Anybody know how to condense a custom figure down into one bone file so that you can just click around on theactual figure instead of having to select each layer?

Many thanks in advance.

wizaerd · Post by **wizaerd** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 11:53 pm

Place all the image layers under a bone layer, and add bones. I would probably bind each layer to a bone, the be sure the skeleton layer is selected, and animate each image piece by manipulating the bone. See Tutorial 4.1 in the manual...

7feet · Post by **7feet** » Sun Sep 17, 2006 12:02 am

You need to bind the layers to the bones, using the - yup - Bind Layer [img]http"//www.sevenfeetdesign.com/moho/icons/bindlayer.png[/img] tool. Although they won't bend along multiple bones with that.

Howerever, they should, if they are in the Bone layer, just move. A few things - if they don't right off, select an image layer and choose (top of the main window) Bone>Flexi-Bind Layer, that should do the trick. Also, if you want them to bend with the bones, that the Image layer properties, Image tab, that "Warp using bones" is checked.

Also, I just thought of this. If you are on frame zero, the only tool that's going to show you how it's gonna move is the Manipulate Bones tool. The rest of the bone tools are for setting up the bones at frame zero, they only work for animation at frame 1 up.