Making a Sphere Rig

[the_black_mage]

Hey y'all, i haven't been on in a while cause of school and all. but now that its over I'm back to work! the lest time i was on A:M i started working on a where rig for a project(yes a new one ). so any way i wasn't then and still I'm not very experienced with making rigs. but i have gotten this far, i made a beveled sphere, made the bone, cp weights, and one node to make it bend in the middle.

 

I'm just wondering if theres anything else i should do or something i should change?

 

also the file is v12(yeah i still haven't gotten my mom to update)

 

EDIT:oh i just realized this was in the wrong place...could someone move it please XD

Sphere_rig2.prj

[rusty]

Welcome back 'mage',

 

Outside of putting a single bone in the center, I've never tried to 'rig' a sphere. Unless you had a particular reason for doing so (you wanted the sphere to do something more then squash and stretch), you wouldn't rig a sphere with much more than a single bone. Most people don't even add a bone to it -- they just use the 'model bone' which all models have as soon as they are created (its hidden, go into bones mode and in the PWS select the model name and you'll see it... of course rarely do you move or mess with it).

 

So, unless you want the sphere to deform and move in some way you would have no reason for more then perhaps one bone at the center so you could manipulate it from the center (the model bone is at the 0/0/0 coordinates or bottom of the model and is used for stuff like telling a path constraint which way the model should face and where the bottom is).

 

Cheers,

Rusty

[the_black_mage]

well it does squash and stretch and i have 4 bones in the middle and one node, which lets it move its center in any direction. it deforms pretty well i think, but is it good for animation is what i'm not sure about...

[the_black_mage]

a small update on it, i added 2 poses to make the center expand and compress...that was you can move the center and control how big it is.

Sphere_rig2.prj

[rusty]

well it does squash and stretch and i have 4 bones in the middle and one node, which lets it move its center in any direction. it deforms pretty well i think, but is it good for animation is what i'm not sure about...

 

I don't think too many people go to that much trouble squash and stretch a sphere but of course you can if you wish. And anything is good practice. I'm sure it is good for animation and I'm sure that you could create many different kinds of rigs to do the same thing. All is cool. Good work.

 

Edit: All the beginner classes and tutorials I've seen do this have all used one bone in the center. To squash and stretch they just selected the sphere in muscle mode then pressed 'S' to go into scale mode and stretched or squashed in this manner. There is also a very cool expression you can use that will insure that the volume of the sphere remains the same -- I don't know it off hand (wish I did) but the tutorial is on the Hash site somewhere.

[itsjustme]

Here is a rigged ball that Robert Holmen made...it's pretty cool.

[the_black_mage]

yeah it is, but i'm trying to make mines a bit more versitle...