idiot's guide to rigging & weighting for xsi?

flaagan

i'd like to get some decent / basic knowledge of rigging and weight painting with softimage's XSI 4.2; just a simple 'this is how you build a rig, attach it to a model, and paint the weights for bones'..a web site link will work fine, but if any of you guys are particularily comfortable with this and wouldn't mind pulling together a quick series of screenshots on how to do this with some quick notes, I'd really appreciate it (as would some friends of mine). I'd just like to use the rigging to pose some models (character and otherwise).

James Edwards

Well if all you are going to do is posing I'd say use the default rigs. They are perfect for that, with simple controls, and a nice setup guide rig for quickly matching the animation rig to your mesh proportions and posing. They even have all the deformers grouped separately so when you envelope you just click on the deformer group and it's done.

I'll try and put something together for you over the next day or so if I have time and nobody beats me to it. From skeleton, right through to weights. Until then here's a couple of links that might help somewhat:

http://www.edharriss.com/tutorials/tutorial_character_setup_xsi/index.html

http://www.joncrow.com/tutorials/xsi_tuts/skeletons/xsi_skels.htm

http://www.joncrow.com/tutorials/xsi_tuts/Character_rig/character_rig.htm

http://www.starlitestudios.net/

http://www.joncrow.com/tutorials/xsi_tuts/envelopes/envelope_weighting.htm

ElysiumGX

cool.

I'm having trouble converting the guides to rigs. I set up the guide, and select "rig from guide", it creates the rig, and after completion nothing is there...and I can't locate it in the explorer. I'll read these later to hopefully find which wrong step I'm taking. I was able to set up a simple rig, and was looking for some more info on weighting.