United3dArtists Archive

I little while ago i decided to see if I could follow a rigging tutorial for Lightwave. I wanted to see if external controls would work. All of trueSpace rigging controls are internal to the skeleton. Maybe one of the techniques used could be useful to someone in the future, so I posted the scene here. I barely even remember how it all works, but this is what I do remember.

First I wrote a script to copy the skeleton as cubes with custom attributes at the scene level. It also made a plane for the ik handle. I made various helpers and controls from torus and parented them the same as in the tutorial. The helpers are small and gray and the controls are large and red. The ik handle is the last item in the chain and when it moves it activates scripts that move the real ik of the skeleton to the same place as the fake ik plane in the scene, then it updates the positions of the cubes that have been marked as ik controlled so they match the skeleton, then the joints of the skeleton are updated to follow the cubes marked as fk controlled. At the same time some of the cube joints have scripts that make them follow some of the control torus. At this point my memory gets a little hazy.

Anyway, it works but it's not really useful for animation because it makes a for a jiggly skeleton and slow updates.

All controls are red.
Use the big control on the bottom to move the whole thing around.
The small control at the top can be moved around and rotated to aim the knee.
The torus controls can be rotated to get different poses.
The heel torus can be moved around as well as rotated.

I think the controls are also setup so that if you reset the Matrix connector they return to their starting positions.

Quite inventive!

What version is that? I still have 10.1 and 9.6, didn't upgrade to 11.X. They have a rigging system called Genoma (seen the videos).

I wonder if you could rig something like tumbleweeds with that, where the branches use your box bones and then have a force act on the tumbleweed to jitter and shake because of the unstableness? There are some other chaotic 'wiggle motion' that might benefit from that as well, just haven't thought about it long enough.

Actually, the tutorial was for LW version 7. It was an old tut that 3dbuzz made for 3dworld magazine.