Simple Biped Rig in Blender 2.5
on October 9th, 2009, by nathanI 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!
—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.
October 9th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Blender 2.5 is better than humanity!!! LOLOLOLOL
October 9th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
May the Rigs be with you Nathan. 🙂
October 10th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Nice work, and really clean rig presentation. Keep pushing on this side too, Nathan, as we need it a lot in Blender.
Gian
October 10th, 2009 at 12:22 am
Was that Ton yelling in the background? 😛
October 10th, 2009 at 12:36 am
Why there wasnt clowns like nathan when i was young?, he is to funny 😛
October 10th, 2009 at 12:42 am
Very funny !!
October 10th, 2009 at 1:05 am
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.
October 10th, 2009 at 2:24 am
nice!
btw, i feel like the evil laugh could be bad for the…um…public percepetion…just sayin 😛
keep it up though!
October 10th, 2009 at 3:31 am
All our rigs are belong to you!
October 10th, 2009 at 3:37 am
sweet, short, and goofy.
October 10th, 2009 at 5:41 am
Nice – that means pole vector lines can be coloured now!
October 10th, 2009 at 6:15 am
kelo trailer por fabor, please
October 10th, 2009 at 7:00 am
You’re going to do great on the rigging, Nathan. Rigging is now awesome!
October 10th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
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 😉
October 10th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Haha, the first few seconds of the video, LOOOL!
Keep them coming, videos are great!
October 10th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
@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?).
October 10th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
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.
October 10th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
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 😀
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 🙂 because things didn’t work at all for me.
So, let’s make the work talk instead of the words 😉
Here it is the model in question (it does have issues):
http://rogper.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/juna/
Hope it somehow helps 🙂
October 10th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
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.
October 10th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
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..
October 10th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Hi Nathan, i noticed you got a pyconstraint script inside the rig. Are pyconstraints allready working in the current build? That would be awesome.
October 10th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
@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
October 11th, 2009 at 2:09 am
I watched this 3 times today! 😮
“…that make me feel all special and warm and fuzzy.”
I thought you always felt fuzzy.. 😉
October 11th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
@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. 🙂
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.
October 11th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
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
October 11th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
@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.)
October 11th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
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
October 12th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
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?
October 26th, 2009 at 4:38 am
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.
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:39 am
Nathan, you’re the best! I’m your fan.
November 23rd, 2009 at 7:52 am
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!
January 18th, 2010 at 5:56 am
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.
January 27th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Good job on version 2.5 – looking for more updates soon.
July 3rd, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Gracias
July 28th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
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
November 1st, 2010 at 2:34 pm
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.