Rigging robots
polycounter lvl 9
I spent the better part of my day looking into tutorials and so far I feel like I am hitting a brick wall every time. I had a friend show me a method, but now I'm not so sure that I'm doing the right thing.
I started with the fingers, but the problem is, using this method, even with axes constraints in the hierarchy, its really really glitchy when I rotate and move any of the fingers around.
So basically the method is using a lot of dummies, look at constraints, links and one HI Solver. The movement is also very limited because of the fact that each finger only uses one HI solver. So I cant really rotate the tip of the finger or anything in that nature.
Current state of the rig (I think im doing it wrong though):
What it looks like with out the mess:
Any help, or any tutorials to how to rig a robot would be greatly appreciated!!
I started with the fingers, but the problem is, using this method, even with axes constraints in the hierarchy, its really really glitchy when I rotate and move any of the fingers around.
So basically the method is using a lot of dummies, look at constraints, links and one HI Solver. The movement is also very limited because of the fact that each finger only uses one HI solver. So I cant really rotate the tip of the finger or anything in that nature.
Current state of the rig (I think im doing it wrong though):
What it looks like with out the mess:
Any help, or any tutorials to how to rig a robot would be greatly appreciated!!
Replies
Save the IK/HK for things like legs and arms.
Wonderful! It's working like a charm just linking dummy objects for pivots and adjust the pivot points.
Thanks!
There are a few reasons for this:
1) If you haven't reset the scale/transform on the mesh it will deform and behave oddly when linked to something, if it's skinned it won't do that.
2) When you delete (not collapse) the skin modifier it jumps back to its original position which is very helpful if you need to reset the mesh. If you unlink something it won't pop back, it nomrally offsets or stays where it was unlinked, very unhelpful...
3) If you need to adjust the mesh you can turn off "always deform" and the mesh stops following the bones, make changes then turn it back on and the mesh follows along again. With meshes linked to one another they follow each other around and inherit things like scale which throws off the alignment of pieces. Linking just introduces a lot of weird glitchy bugs that you don't have to deal with if you use skin.
Thanks again!
So I'm trying to rig up some tank tracks. I watched a tutorial on a method to do it, using a splineIK solver. However, the track is twisted around the spline, and fiddling with the twist values doesn't fix it. Is this not the best way to go? I'm pretty new to rigging things, so perhaps I am missing something. Any suggestions? If anyone knows of any good mechanical rigging tutorials that'd be ace too.