itsjustme

Happy Birthday, Jason and Steve!

It's been hard to find enough time to get finished, but, here's where the arm rig stands at the moment. I've got it able to bend backward in IK and have a soft IK that I adapted from one made by Andy Nicholas for another program...there's one difference that I made that would allow for the bicep and forearm to be scaled differently and I'm sure the constraints used and the way they are combined would be different. I'm going to add the resizing next, then I'll see about putting it in Squetchy Sam and running a bunch of tests. Here are a couple of quick clips showing the arm and some of what it does. elbow_with_soft_IK_03_22_2010.mov elbow_no_soft_IK_03_22_2010.mov arm_test_03_22_2010.mov

Very cool, Mark!

Looks great so far, Mark!

Possibly, Robert Patrick?

Happy Birthday, Robert!

Looks great, Ken! The only question I have is about the dark queen...it looks like a hybrid with the knight on that image?

Looks great, Eric!

Looks great so far, Lee!

Thanks, David. As you can see, I tend to respond to the slightest bit of encouragement. Here's the "Poster". Good things should be encouraged. Very nice work!

He looks great, Hutch!

Another update on where things stand at the moment. The tail rig is being looked at by Mark Skodacek to see if he can see what I'm not seeing on the problem I've been having. A video showing the present controls is here...of course, some things will probably change. I'll be looking at it over the next couple of days as well...as soon as I can clear my head from the lack of sleep. To get my mind off of the tail temporarily, I've been working on an arm/leg rig that will have soft IK and at least one more trick to it...still a couple of things to do on that. If I can get enough time, I'll make a tutorial to keep the eye modeling tutorial company.

Very cool, Myron! That is poster material.

Now that's cool, Robert!

I didn't have a problem with the Squetch Rig either...do you have two keys set in your on/off Pose that are the same? Like having IK arms turned off at both the "off" and "on" setting in the Pose? If I did that, the baking (which allows for FK/IK seamless switching) would keep the arms in their original position in an Action/Choreography. Hope that helps.

A search for clouds, maybe? Or smoke?

Looks great, Ken!

He looks really good. The only places I see that I would think about adding a spline would be the wrist area, (which has been mentioned) that would be better if it had three spline rings, the forearm could probably use another spline ring between the upper forearm and wrist and possibly one more spline ring around the mid-section at the height of the navel. Hope that helps.

Looks cool so far, Eric! Moving that fast in the water, a path of spray would help sell it.

"Orient like" constraints set to "50%" have been all I've needed, the rest is in how it gets weighted and the location of the second fan bone...I have its' origin at 1/4 the length of the bicep bone from the elbow. Hope that helps.

That's the latest Squetchy Sam's arm (with the unreleased version of the Squetch Rig), so there are several things going on in there. A simple version without any flexing is in an example file I posted here. The latest Squetchy Sam is here.

In order for it to make a better bend, you would need to add a spline to the center of the forearm and the center of the bicep...I've been using two fan bones for elbows for a while as well. As has been mentioned, Smartskin can also fix it. Here's a quick clip showing the two fan bones in the elbow. elbow_fan_bones_example.mov

Looks great, Robert!

I'll put your book on my to-buy list, Robert! Excellent test.

Nice!