Modo Rigging/Animation - few questions
polycounter lvl 12
I recently started working on my rigging/animation skills. I am rigging and animating in Modo and using it all in Unity.
I have a rig in which legs and arms have IK solvers. I also have some constrains on feet. Some of the controllers are just parents of bones (like those blue cubes driving the spine or head and neck).
Animation isn't covered as good as other parts of creating character so I struggle to find good info. I hope you will be able to answer some of my questions.
1 - I know that I shouldn't be animating bind skeleton (never ?). I should be animating controls. I have a rig with most of the bones driven by controls. When I export to Unity should I also export controls? The animation can be baked into bones which means controlls doesn't need to be exported but I'm wondering what's the best approach.
2 - I don't have any controlls for palms and fingers. How should i go about creating those? I saw some solutions in which through a custom menu you can curl all or separate fingers.
3 - In an example rig 'Bolo' from Foundry site i saw they created some controllers for each bone in hand (they look like duplicated bones but they just control bones). This rig is way too complicated for me too understand everything though. Is it standard way of giving some FK functionallity?
4 - How do i go about FK when I use IK? I know FK is better when you want to work on precision and arcs. Is FK the same as animating bind joints or should I create different controlls for FK?
5 - Is animating with IK and using FK for some minor tweaks how you should animate ?
Thanks in advance for any help!:)
I have a rig in which legs and arms have IK solvers. I also have some constrains on feet. Some of the controllers are just parents of bones (like those blue cubes driving the spine or head and neck).
Animation isn't covered as good as other parts of creating character so I struggle to find good info. I hope you will be able to answer some of my questions.
1 - I know that I shouldn't be animating bind skeleton (never ?). I should be animating controls. I have a rig with most of the bones driven by controls. When I export to Unity should I also export controls? The animation can be baked into bones which means controlls doesn't need to be exported but I'm wondering what's the best approach.
2 - I don't have any controlls for palms and fingers. How should i go about creating those? I saw some solutions in which through a custom menu you can curl all or separate fingers.
3 - In an example rig 'Bolo' from Foundry site i saw they created some controllers for each bone in hand (they look like duplicated bones but they just control bones). This rig is way too complicated for me too understand everything though. Is it standard way of giving some FK functionallity?
4 - How do i go about FK when I use IK? I know FK is better when you want to work on precision and arcs. Is FK the same as animating bind joints or should I create different controlls for FK?
5 - Is animating with IK and using FK for some minor tweaks how you should animate ?
Thanks in advance for any help!:)
Replies
You don't need to export he controllers. They'll just wind up coming into Unity as empty GameObjects - they have no further relevance to the rig as animation is baked down.
There's nothing wrong with keyframing bones individually, though. It's just that animation is a little easier to manage if the keyframes are all kept to the controllers.
I'm not certain on IK/FK stuff. Generally I'll use IK for arms/legs and just use FK for other bits... but I'm really not an animator :P
Might want to look into Lukaz's ACS kit. It should handle a lot of that stuff pretty well.
Also keep an eye out for Rich Hurrey's updated Rigging Master Course for Modo, it should be very, very in-depth... whenever it gets released.
New question appeared:
6 - I didn't properly skinned the mesh. Should I be able to fix weights at this point ? I have all those dependencies and constrains. I thought that it won't be a problem to fix weights even at this point. My weight tools act wonky though... Erase doesn't erase and Paint sometimes adds weight values sometimes removes them...