For this part I’ll go into some detail about the setup on the arms and claws as well as touch on a few other things as I prime this character for his first round of animation testing. More after the jump!
Tag Archives: tutorial
Rigging a Scorpion Mech: Part Six, IK Legs
I mentioned in an earlier post that I thought the head would require the most complicated rig to work. Today’s post is to show that 1) I was sorely mistaken, and 2) the leg rig is quite interesting and borrowed a setup often used for the hind legs of cat and dog rigs. More after the jump!
Rigging a Scorpion Mech: Part Five, Messing with the legs
I’ve now made further progress in rigging the legs. For the limbs, I’m implementing an IK/FK setup. My approach for setting up the switch is a twist on the standard 3-bone setup where the original joint chain is duplicated and influenced by two separate chains.
Rigging a Scorpion Mech: Part Four, Progress on Proxy Model
Reduced model to about 12k polys. The original model is about 330k.
Positing a minor update. With the rig completed for the spine and tail, today I mostly focused on creating a proxy mesh for the newly rigged areas. A handy tool I like to use when building proxy models is zooSurgeon. This neat script takes a skinned mesh, breaks it down to solid segments, and constrains the segments to influencing joints. I incorporate this script in my workflow by first skinning the reduced mesh using solid weights (one joint per vertex), and then running the script to get my true proxy. For me, this is efficient because I can preview the behavior of the proxy prior to breaking down the model.
Rigging a Scorpion Mech: Part Three, Tail, Spine and Adding Some Control
Without legs or claws, the mech looks kinda like a snake!
Here we are, part three, and progress is looking good. For this post, I’ll describe some of the processes I’m using to set up the spine and tail’s behavior. Read on!
Rigging a Scorpion Mech: Part Two, Head Setup
For this part, I’ll go into my detail on my initial rig for the Scorpion’s head, which compose of the mandibles, face, and the wicked tubing and pistons attached to the skull. I decided to tackle this part of the character early since it’s likely the most complicated part of the overall rig, in terms of joint setup.
Rigging a Scorpion Mech: Part One, Prepping the Model
I thought it be interesting to document my rigging process from start to finish using a fairly challenging model. I’m not going to push this series of tutorials as an “ideal” way to rig such a machination, but it will show one approach. I’m going to rig a scorpion model I came across in the forums of CGTalk (original post here). The artist, Nicholas Silveira, modeled and rigged the creature and was nice enough to share the bare model to give anyone else the oppurtunity to rig his creation.
Tips & Tricks: More memory for 3ds Max
here’s a bitmap error that comes up in 3ds Max when using exceedingly large texture files or fairly long image sequences in the scene. The error usually brings up this window:
I ran into this error recently with a rig that’s using more memory than 3ds Max’s current threshold. I did some poking around the Autodesk forums and came across a solution that seemed to work. Continue reading
Tips & Tricks: Animated Texture in 3ds Max
3ds Max is relatively new to me and I’m very much used to the way maya does a lot of things. To get an animated texture to work in Maya, you simply make a material and assign an image sequence or movie to it. Max also does this but there is a snag.
When importing an animated texture in either package, the default is to sync the texture’s animation with the scene’s time slider. For the particular project I’m working on, I need to to have the frames of the texture controlled by a control in the rig so the animator can play with it (the texture in this case being the pupil of a cartoon eye). Max’s bitmap has no way of reconnecting the active frame of the texture. There was once a plug-in to achieve this feature, but it’s not compatible with 2008. Running out of time, I came up with a ghetto solution that still does the trick.
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