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    Simple Biped Rig in Blender 2.5

    on October 9th, 2009, by nathan

    I spent some of this week re-rigging my “Simple Biped Rig” in Blender 2.5. I did this to help verify that the basic rigging tools are now functioning in Blender 2.5.

    Fortunately, they are!

    Simple Biped for Blender 2.5 from Project Durian on Vimeo.

    So far my favorite new rigging features in Blender 2.5 are the ability to make bones unselectable, and the availability of quaternion, euler, and axis-angle rotations for both objects and bones (yay!).

    But I still have a lot to test. Next up I’ll be rigging a full character mesh (though not a final character for the film.

    Wish me luck!

    โ€”Nathan

    UPDATE:

    For those of you wanting to play with the rig, here is the file: biped_rig_25.blend

    I place it in the public domain via the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license.

    All of the controls are on the first five armature layers.

    36 Responses to “Simple Biped Rig in Blender 2.5”

    1. jachristie79 Says:

      Blender 2.5 is better than humanity!!! LOLOLOLOL

    2. Satish 'Iluvblender' Goda Says:

      May the Rigs be with you Nathan. ๐Ÿ™‚

    3. Gianmichele Says:

      Nice work, and really clean rig presentation. Keep pushing on this side too, Nathan, as we need it a lot in Blender.

      Gian

    4. Anthoni Says:

      Was that Ton yelling in the background? ๐Ÿ˜›

    5. NIK Says:

      Why there wasnt clowns like nathan when i was young?, he is to funny ๐Ÿ˜›

    6. sozap Says:

      Very funny !!

    7. Todd McCullough Says:

      Will this rig be available for download? I would like to play with it in order to become better familiar with animating, rigging and weighting in general with Blender.

    8. bluetygr Says:

      nice!

      btw, i feel like the evil laugh could be bad for the…um…public percepetion…just sayin ๐Ÿ˜›

      keep it up though!

    9. James Says:

      All our rigs are belong to you!

    10. RH2 Says:

      sweet, short, and goofy.

    11. Mike Says:

      Nice – that means pole vector lines can be coloured now!

    12. entok Says:

      kelo trailer por fabor, please

    13. D Says:

      You’re going to do great on the rigging, Nathan. Rigging is now awesome!

    14. rogper Says:

      Great camera work!
      Good to see that you heal faster then Wolverine…

      Do you think/expect it will be easier to rig Durian humanoid characters then BBB animals?
      What about cloth!? I’m personally having allot of serious difficulties to have full cloths working like we expect. Making it like in the “Elephants Dream” works… for jackets and such, but if you want several layers of loose cloth, (like trunks, t-shirt and jacket) it’s very challenging.

      Good sequence of favorable events that will guide you to the successful completion of the rig then ๐Ÿ˜‰

    15. DingTo Says:

      Haha, the first few seconds of the video, LOOOL!

      Keep them coming, videos are great!

    16. nathan Says:

      @rogper:

      I expect rigging the bodies of the characters in Durian will be easier than BBB, but that the faces will be more difficult than BBB. There was a lot we could get away with for the BBB faces because of the cartoony style and lack of dialog that we won’t be able to get away with in Durian.

      In fact, I expect rigging faces will be one of my greatest challenges on this project, and I’m very glad to be partnering with Angela on that task. I’m very nervous about getting the facial rigs to a level that I’m happy with. I have zero experience with realistic facial rigging, so this is completely new territory for me.

      Getting cloth-sim to a production-ready level is definitely one of my targets, but it will depend a lot on where we most need to spend developer time (the Blender devs are amazing, but they don’t have infinite time!).

      We have an advantage in that Blender’s cloth sim is already very good in terms of the quality of the results and flexibility. It’s also fast enough for production use, though it could be faster. I think the biggest issue with it right now is collision detection (which is probably why you have such difficulty getting good multi-layer clothing setups?).

    17. Shawn Kearney Says:

      Someone should really make the sliders MIDI controllable. Having a tactile interface would add considerable control and MIDI control surfaces would be an excellent and relatively simple way of doing this.

    18. rogper Says:

      As a modeler I’ve been struggling with the “how much can I simplify the cloth” question.
      First I’ve tried to make it fully closed objects with volume… that didn’t work, because it was a nightmare to do any changes;
      Then I deleted the inside polygons that we don’t see, saving polygons… and that works good, but that meant (at least as my knowledge goes) that I couldn’t use the cloth simulator in the actual cloth anymore… so I complicated even more things and made pockets, buttons and zips to go with… that totally made it impossible to rig ๐Ÿ˜€

      As rigger the most challenging is in fact the collision and making the cloth(the one we actually see) follow correctly the simplified cloth that has the cloth simulated object… and when we talk of several cloths on top of each other… I had to quit for the moment and see what comes next in blender world ๐Ÿ™‚ because things didn’t work at all for me.

      So, let’s make the work talk instead of the words ๐Ÿ˜‰
      Here it is the model in question (it does have issues):
      http://rogper.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/juna/

      Hope it somehow helps ๐Ÿ™‚

    19. MTracer Says:

      I think my only main rigging problem with blender is some scaling difficulties. I think work should be done to make all rigging features scalable, without distorting or breaking.

      I don’t understand Etch-a-Ton too well, but it would also be nice to edit a rig, and then apply all the constraint setting to the new proportions, such as stretch length, global space limits, and maybe even move all the unseen mechanism bones.

    20. iamawizard Says:

      any near future plans of making cloth sim multi threaded?
      thats definitely one thing i am waiting for

      it takes way too long to test and retest with only 1 core working on it when i have 8 on my machine.

      keep up the good work guys..

    21. Loolarge Says:

      Hi Nathan, i noticed you got a pyconstraint script inside the rig. Are pyconstraints allready working in the current build? That would be awesome.

    22. Gianmichele Says:

      @Nathan: so by what you’re writing there’ll be dialogue in Durian. Am I right ?
      What about other accessories for characters, like chains and the like ?

      At work I have to animate a lot of realistic faces. If I can give you a trick, the rig is not limited in its range of expression, in fact in a lot of places is really cartoony. Not going into that realm and making it much more realistic is a task for animators.

      Gian

    23. Becca (RedJay) Says:

      I watched this 3 times today! ๐Ÿ˜ฎ

      “…that make me feel all special and warm and fuzzy.”
      I thought you always felt fuzzy.. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    24. nathan Says:

      @Loolarge:
      There aren’t any pyconstraints in this rig, only pydrivers. I haven’t tried pyconstraints yet.

      @Gianmichele:
      We’re not sure if there will be dialogue yet, but it’s a definitely possibility.

      Thanks for the rigging advice. ๐Ÿ™‚
      My biggest worry is giving the faces the fine level of control and detail and subtlety that real faces have. With the BBB faces I could get away with a lot and people just attribute it to the cartoon look of the film.

    25. Anup Says:

      Hi Nathan,

      I have been trying out the biped rig and have been having some fun. The simplicity of your biped rig makes it a favourable choice to start learning. Keep up the good work.

      A tutorial of the biped character doing a 360 flip would be great. I tried the 360 flip (with the rig root on the floor all the time) but the rig contorts at the pelvis for some reason. I am sure you know how to do it right. Any ideas?

      Regards,
      Anup

    26. nathan Says:

      @Anup:
      You’re probably having issues with the quaternion rotation flipping. I’ll perhaps make a short tutorial on dealing with that issue in the future. I’m not sure if 2.5 yet has the tools for fixing it. (Also, ideally, Blender should just make it not happen in the first place. It’s not an inherent problem with quaternions.)

    27. adrian2608 Says:

      Hi Nathan!
      I have a very interesting IK|FK ,blending system, take a look (I also upload a tutorial for it )
      Maybe, You find it helpful ,cheers!

      http://www.sendspace.com/file/o0j20l

    28. Stephen Says:

      Hi Nathan,
      thanks for the update, it’s certainly exciting time to be involved with Blender.
      Regarding the controls, have you just changed the display properties of the bones, or are you now able to parent the bones to some control curves/meshes?

      Also, are there going to be any rigging tutorials with the release of Durian, its nice having all the resources, but I’d like to know how to do them from scratch?

    29. groomedmonkey Says:

      Ahh hinge controllers for rotating the entire rig would be useful. I posted on your forum thread about the 2.4x rig yesterday as the limbs go way wonky if to rotate the Super-controller (Rig Root) bone. Means I have to rotate the armature and mesh in object mode to get its initial orientation for an animation – really sux.

    30. Carlos H. Passos Says:

      Nathan, you’re the best! I’m your fan.

    31. Eric Says:

      This is great! I will use this to ask someone to formal I think (JK)
      (for those of you wondering how to download, right-click the link and “save link to desktop” then rename the file, removing the .txt extension at the end. You will now have the correct blend file.)
      thanks nathan!

    32. Daniel H (goodguy20k) Says:

      Ok, question… Why are you still using bone based sliders/drivers, when the interface system is now scriptable? Wouldn’t it be easier/more accessible to have the sliders be UI elements in some window pane, so that you can change the 3D view without losing access to sliders? I know some of the sliders aren’t accessed that often, and the “old method” was to split a 3D view in and point and pan it to view just the slider area, but it seemed like overhead.

      But then, I suppose some sort of python script to create the interface would be a bit of overhead, too.

    33. Richard Says:

      Good job on version 2.5 – looking for more updates soon.

    34. Javier Says:

      Gracias

    35. Anup Says:

      Hi Nathan,

      As reported on http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=177370
      the rig has some issues with the ik/fk sliders. How can this be corrected ?
      I do not want to use the Simple Adult Rig as I feel the biped rig here is a better choice for beginners.

      Regards,
      Anup

    36. Ana Says:

      I have no experience in rigging and I tried to find a fix for the next issue, but haven’t found a solution:
      – When rotating the pelvis on Z Axis, which is Y axis in transform properties – the side to side rotation – the Knee Targets move as well resulting in bad animation.

      Other rigs I’ve tried don’t have this issue, the knee targets maintaining their positions until I tell them to move. Is there a way to fix this? I’ve tried locking some of the properties, searched to see if there needs to be a certain constrain set up but I don’t Know how to do it.