Updated the rig to have an automated hand control. Also tweaked the shoulder so that the IK has a lower influence and the shoulder can now also be easily moved via FK.

There is a finger control, it a bit hard to see as it currently overlaps with the actual finger bones. Rotating it rotates the entire finger, scaling it bends the finger. But I think he also ask for a fist control earlier. Or are you referring to his rotation comment? As I stated earlier that is currently intended like that... I experimented a bit with finding a different solution... but for now the way it is set up seems the best to me (even though the hand does not rotate with the forearm).

A weapon bone is something I forgot about... yes could be usefull. Just right of my head I can't think of a different solution than parenting it of the hand_control, which would not really result in an additional control option (but it might be needed never the less for game-export).

Found this for the widgets btw:

http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/misc-objects/metarig-shape-library/

Next step will probably be the copy-rot. rig and the widgets. Afterwards I will experiment with the spine control some more.

Ahh you are right about the hand target as a parent, fixed it.

Also added a copy-rot. rig to the file (second bone layer first row), seems to work perfectly (see v6)

I had a close look at the meta rig shape files (I just wanted to "steal" the widget wires from there) but I don't like their look so much. Maybe I find some other freely licensed ones to save the touble of making them myself.

Added a unified head and torso controler (grab moves upper torso, rotate rotates head and with 0.5 weight the neck) and a pole target to control the rotation of the upper torso. Rather unusual setup for the torso I guess, but for me it seems to work. please test it!

Could you be more precise what is not working on the spine IK? It works pretty nice on my pc. You are using the head_target to control it right?

Oh and except for a few good tuts on how to do feet, most of the blender rigs you will find on the net are either highly complex movie rigs, or basicly just a chain of bones (and most of the time quite rubbish too). I am basicly forced to innovate here, as there simply is nothing comparable out there for Blender.

I found some nice videos of rigs for Houdini and Maya, which seem to have more advanced controls, but reimplmenting the behaviour in Blender, just by looking at the vids is far from easy.

*me likes IK*

My current reasoning is that I want to have as individual little controls as possible, while still keeping a maximum of movement options. AFAIK this is the general idea of good rigs.

Concerning the spine IK... I think it mirrors the movement of the human spine surprisingly well. In the extreme positions it looks a bit strange though I agree, but this is ment to be used for relative small movements really. And in that range it works quite well. Contrary to most movie rigs I develop this rig with what kind of animations are likely to be done for games in mind. There really isn't going to be a lot of extreme acrobatics going to be involved...even though I think the current rig could actually be used for animating something like Tombraider just fine.

The problem with the movie rigs is that they often use all sort of non bone animation helpers, which will be difficult to tanslate into in-game bone movement. But currently my rig can pretty much do all what is shown with the Mancandy rig.

Edit: Ok I limited the movement of the spine IK and shortend its chain by one so that you can FK control the lowest spine bone, also I improved the handling of the pelvis so that it can now be rotated independantly of the upper body, but the upper body still follows its location. See v71

Hmm maybe I should rephrase my reasoning a bit... wasn't that clear I think.

For me a good rig is one that has only a few clickable controls that allow you to move a rig into more or less 99% of the positions you want it to be, while automatically dealing with all the tedious work of rotating individual bones. Of course it is nice to have the option of being able to tweak the exact locations also, but most of the time (if it is a good rig) you don't even have to bother with that. And having an easy one-click control outweights having individual precise control, if both don't work together (but of course an balance should be tried to achived).

In addition to that... this is ment to be a game rig, and in games you rarely have the close up shots you have in movies, thus I think for the sake of making the animation easier, we can sacrifice a bit of the precision if really needed.

Concerning the controller bones in movie rigs... well yes, but often that is tightly intervowen, with bones effecting one part of the mesh, while also acting as a target for another etc. And besides that, it is quite difficult to figure out how to replicate a behaviour if the rig is really complex, so these movie rigs are not exactly easy to learn from (I am looking at you man-candy >:( ).

I think it should be good enough for game cutscenes too... lets face it neither are game animations as high quality as movie animations in general, nor do open-source games have to reach that level. It's about speeding up the development to save man-hours for other more important things, while keeping the animation quality at a still very good (but maybe not perfect) level. A certain compromise has to be made.

Regarding the vid you posted (btw do you have more details on the setup of that?), I will go though the animations and try to replicate them with my rig:

1. movement of hip --- exactly the same if the pelvis bone is "grabbed"

2. movement of upper torso --- similar if head_target is grapped, but it does currently not extend as far downwards, there is some improvement possible there... but that is actually more IK rather than less.

3. rotation of hips --- similar to rotating the pelvis... doesn't move the upper body in my rig however. I am not sure if that is actually a good thing though. (It seems like the spine is a bezier curve in that mesh... possible to replicate in blender, maybe I will give it a try, not sure if that can be easily translated onto a bone only copy-rot rig)

4. rotation of upper torso --- sidewards up and down: possible (rotate spine.03), sidewards back and forth (move spine_target): possible, just back and forth: not really that possible with my rig... well sort of as that gets interpolated for most movements whem moving the head_target. Not really a very often used movement the latter... but you are right, there the rig in the vid is better in that regard.

5. Rotation of the middel torso --- possible by rotating spine.01, but again less movement resulting in the hips... maybe that's good or not.

Thanks for posting that vid! I might have a look at such a bezier spine and test it with my rig. It isn't currently a big difference however. Animations feel a bit smoother though, thus I guess you partially convinced me to try it out at least.

Arrgg... I think I figured out why there are no good tutorial on spine rigs for Blender, and why there are pretty much only FK spine setups in all rig you can download on the net. It seems like if you want to replicate the spines you can do in other animation packages (like the vid above) you need this brand new feature called "spine IK" and before it wasn't possible at all. The problem is that new feature seems wastly under-documented and also still pretty buggy :(

I had tried to use it already, but it didn't seem to work at all... that's why I didn't really had a second look at it. Turns out you need to set up a curve before. But even though that is probably easy... there are some problems that you have to seperate your rig in different armatures to avoid some bugs etc... really a mess to set up it seems.

Found two tutorials though... but both deal with non-human spine setups :(

http://users.xplornet.com/~gimble/blender/tutorials/spline_ik/spline_ik.htm

http://vimeo.com/12629274

Ehhm yes spline it is called, never the less I am quite sure that that is what is needed to duplicate the behaviour you linked in that video. It doesn't need that many bone though, you can map much less bones to the curve.

I will probably try doing a spine with that ;)

Oh and while playing with that I realized that I made a huge mistake by not putting the copy-rot rig into a seperate armature. Fixed in v72 (damn that was a lot of stupid extra work).

Edit... argg that buggy crap... in general the spline ik seems to do what I expected it to do (e.g. you would be very happy with the torso behaviour), but right now it really deforms the rest of the rig badly, and I have no idea why.

Sorry to say that but you don't seem to know what you are talking about. Have a closer look at the vid you posted and you will see that the movement obviously follows the path of a bezier curve all the way from the hip to the shoulders.

In fact I have already a sort of working spine utilizing a spline IK that behaves very similar to the video. The problem is that there seems to be a bug in Blender 2.55 that makes it always deform the bones badly, regardless of whether or not you activate that checkbox or not:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=202910

Sadly there don't seem to be many people around who actually know this new feature in detail, and I just about tried everything now :( It's not the general feature though that is not working.

Of course you are right that a splineIK is a nice way to control many bones, but it is basically not IK at all. It is a "FK" method that makes a set of bones follow a curve. And with a curve like that you can very nicely control a human spine too. With more bones it of course animates smoother, but 3 or 4 are just fine to approximate a human spine.

Well, for now I am sick of dealing with that crappy Spline IK function... the concept is fine I guess, Blender's implementation just doesn't work properly for what I have in mind :(

How about a spine rig like this:

http://vimeo.com/3807543

Or maybe like this:

http://www.vimeo.com/10685206

?

Edit: Ahh, it really was a Blender bug... http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=202910&p=1742175#post17...

it's supposed to be fixed in the svn now, so I will probably wait until the next Blender 2.5 beta arrives before continuing to implement a spine. So next I will try to give the rig some widgets ;)

The strechy behaviour of the first one? Yes you are right, but I think you can turn that off easily.

The rest of the controls of that setup seem quite nice though. Currently I am a bit unsure what to do next, maybe I will just go ahead and implement that spine, as it seems to be a decent setup (more standard than what the rig has right now, and the spline IK rig I have in mind is something that might tun out to be much better, or not work at all...).

Just found that article, maybe it is of interest:

http://www.harkyman.com/2010/11/26/recording-ik-movement-into-fk-bones/

Ahh thanks for the article. I think what he is getting at is the FK/IK switching that was discussed earlier.

I am not so much of an expert regarding that, but it seems to me that this is mostly an issue that comes up with movie animations, where you have much more and extreme animations. While with game aninations you have a small set which you can basically keyframe "to death" and thus the problem of misbehaving IK chains between the keyframes is almost non existant. But I might be totally wrong about that... I guess I will see once I start doing some animations.

He, you said that before, and I didn't want to start a discussion about it, but except for the fact that there is of course stricty technical speaking no difference, the actual difference in what to animate, how to animate and the amount of animation necessary is huge. Thus for all practical matters they are two completely different beasts, and this reflects on how to build a rig too.

Here's one that I made. The figure is fairly low poly so you can do whatever with it...

I was using this in one of my projects, so there might be some logic/ animations there, but you can fix that by opening a new file and just appending the rig and model.

Enjoy!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7417218/BasicCharacter.blend

Soo, what was the conclusion here? Yay/Nay?

Well, there was a bug in Blender 2.5 preventing me from further experiementing with the spline IK for the torso. Otherwise the rig is quite advanced already (needs a simple/game compatible face rig  and widgets though).

If I find the time in the next couple of weeks I will see if the new version of Blender fixed the issue and then I will add widgets and so on and maye a quick face rig too. However I am really busy with real life issues, so don't count on a quick solution.

Do you want to start making animations, or why do you ask?

Well, I wanted to hook it up to CubeCreate but then I realised I don't /reeeealy/ know how to animate properly or how to assign rigs, and don't really have the time to learn

heh, story of my life. Never stopped me from doing anything though :p

Hi Julius, im hoping you still reply here. i am trying to retarget the hand to my mesh, but when ever i move the hand rig in edit mode the fingers go wierd directions when i tab back to object mode. do you know how i can fix this?

Clint Bellanger: "The rigs I use for creatures/heros in OSARE are amateurish.  No weights, just vertex groups."

In Blender, every assignment of a vertex group has weight to it.  If you don't use weight, it defaults to just 0 and 100.  100 is max weight, while 0 is no weight.

Sorry didn't see your reply earlier.

Honestly I didn't have a look at the rig for a long time, and it is probably either something that changed in Blender or an amateurish error of mine back then (both equally likely I guess).

However quite often it is also easier to adjust the mesh to a rig then the other way around.

But as I wrote back then already... I am really no expert on rigs and am just struggling with an similar error on another rig I got from blendswap :(

I've noticed that a lot of the models shared on BlendSwap either do not hae rigs at all or are rigged very poorly.  You're better off just looking at rigging tutorials and making a rig of your own.