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I Can't Rig Yet I Need To


Darkwing

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So yeah, I'm trying to get at least one character done and out of the way for ELZ, however, I have been trying for days without ny success to rig this character. I modified the GenMan body found on the AM extras CD, and used the 2008 Rig to rig it. Except things just....don't work. I can't describe, and using pics would be useless, so here's the model, and someone please give me some pointers on how to not make things bump, twist, distort and mess up please.

 

Zeroheadtest2010.mdl

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oh, see, i can't imagine anyone even remotely liking the process. I wish I could burn it, kick it, stab it, shoot it, kick it again and yell very nasty words at it. that's just how I feel about it though. it might help if I didn't suck so much :)

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oh, see, i can't imagine anyone even remotely liking the process. I wish I could burn it, kick it, stab it, shoot it, kick it again and yell very nasty words at it. that's just how I feel about it though. it might help if I didn't suck so much :)

 

The more you do something, the less you suck it at...usually. There's a lot of trial and error involved (tons of it, I've been working on my latest set of problems for about three months). I get some satisfaction from solving rigging problems, but I get the same satisfaction when I do anything that turns out well. In animation, everything requires the same amount of patience as rigging (if you want anything good)...modeling, texturing, lighting, animating, etc, but for some reason, most animators have decided rigging is the biggest pain...instead of challenging (like they do other aspects of animation).

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yeeeahh. see that's why i'm not a 3d animator or anything. i actually dislike the process and usually the rewards are fewer then the work put into it. I prefer good ol live action film, something tangible and workable, and something you can change on a whim/impulse. with animation, you get a whim or impulse, it usually means hours or days of work implementing it, instead of just doing it, and by that time, the vision and passion is gone. well, at least for me.

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yeeeahh. see that's why i'm not a 3d animator or anything. i actually dislike the process and usually the rewards are fewer then the work put into it. I prefer good ol live action film, something tangible and workable, and something you can change on a whim/impulse. with animation, you get a whim or impulse, it usually means hours or days of work implementing it, instead of just doing it, and by that time, the vision and passion is gone. well, at least for me.

 

Even live action takes time to do well...not as much time as animation, but slapped-together live action isn't going to look as good as something well thought out and executed. If you'd rather do live action, then do that.

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i know, you don't have to patronize me. i have done live action in the past, it's just live action is pricey and requires resources i don't have, so until i do have them, i'm stuck with AM :)

 

It's not a bad place to be stuck.

 

As far as resources for live action, there are plenty of places to rent gear...a lot cheaper than buying and you can use the latest, greatest widgets without the depreciation.

 

This isn't my patronizing tone, by the way (it's hard to read tone with text) ...just trying to be helpful. I don't know how much anyone knows on any subject. Live action, I know a fair amount about...haven't done much of it for a while though.

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i did some over the summer, well, that was the last i did it, and sorry for reading into your post the wrong way. see, i have moneys, i just have to save it for school, so i can't even go and rent stuff, and my big thing is a location, i have no where to shoot what it is i want to shoot.

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i did some over the summer, well, that was the last i did it, and sorry for reading into your post the wrong way. see, i have moneys, i just have to save it for school, so i can't even go and rent stuff, and my big thing is a location, i have no where to shoot what it is i want to shoot.

 

Maybe a virtual set? Of course that would still require some money and a lot of work, but it could become anywhere you want it to be.

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Not to feed the fire here, Darkwing, but if you get zero enjoyment out of it, why do it?

 

I feel a great sense of accomplishment with everything I do in A:M. I'm aware that only a few years ago, I wouldn't have been able to do any of it. Yes, it's hard and sometimes it's impossibly hard ...but when I find a solution for those impossibly hard problems, I feel even greater.

 

I'm working on a WBP strip right now that is taking about 10 times longer than a normal strip because I'm dealing with fluids and having to make things look a certain way, but I'm not complaining. The end result will be worth all of the sweat ...even if it only takes people 30 seconds to read it and move on.

 

My grandfather told me many things, but one of the ones that has always stuck out is this: "It is a very poor craftsman who blames his tools."

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and I agree with his saying. sure, i like seeing a final product, but in the three and a half years of me using AM, I've not once completed anything with it. I do it because I want to make films, and right now, it's the only resource I have. I'd probably be all right if it were limited to just SFX, as I can do an OK job of that with AM, but I dunno, it's just not my thing. It's like not liking a certain food, yet it's all that's there to eat.

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I actually enjoy rigging. Unfortunately, I am more of a problem-solver than an artist, which has beeen a great source of frustration for me since childhood. I can usually figure out some way to rig a character, but I have very few characters to rig because I stink at modelling.

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and I agree with his saying. sure, i like seeing a final product, but in the three and a half years of me using AM, I've not once completed anything with it. I do it because I want to make films, and right now, it's the only resource I have. I'd probably be all right if it were limited to just SFX, as I can do an OK job of that with AM, but I dunno, it's just not my thing. It's like not liking a certain food, yet it's all that's there to eat.

 

Yet again, you are saying that if it wasn't for A:M, you could make a film. You can make a film with a still camera and pieces of clay, colored bits of paper, with virtually anything. You could construct characters in A:M entirely made of simple geometry and work on camera angles, movement... the fundamentals. At 19, my friends and I made a 60 minute movie with a borrowed video camera and a friend who had access to a primitive 3/4" editing bay at the local college. This was in 1987 when we had virtually none of the tools that you have available to you. We would have loved to have had A:M and digital editing at our disposal!

 

I hate to sound negative, but you keep blaming a tool that *many* people succeed in creating with ...rather than asking yourself why *you* aren't doing something with it?

 

In the pre-digital age, many of my film heroes talked about how turning a dis-advantage into an advantage made their work even better. Spielberg's mechanical shark wouldn't work half the time, so he figured out how to make it even more menacing without showing very much of it.

 

To carry out your food analogy, there are people who can take leftovers and make something wonderful to eat ...and there are people who sit at the table and turn there nose up at anything less than perfection being brought to them.

 

Guess which one is the better chef...

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well, here's my reality, i live in a little rural village in the middle of nowhere, i don't even have the resources you had in the eighties. and i don't just want to make any films, i've done that, for the better part of my childhood, i now have visions and ideas that i want to make. i used to draw images on plastic and shine a flashlight through them to make film, so i don't need the discussion of how i'm blaming the tools. the films I want to make require a video camera, some green screens, costumes and props and minor set pieces. i don't even have a room, and all i have is a 6 foot green screen which allows for head shots. i have money, but i have to save it for this retarded creation known as post-secondary education, of which I don't even know where I'm going or what I'm doing. Now I think we're fueling the fire to go back to an earlier post

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  • Hash Fellow

We're glad you've got a dream! We're just trying to reframe your thinking so you can see what you've got sitting in your lap.

 

Take a look at 11 second club entries. About the only ones who got their own character off the ground are A:M entries. Almost everyone else has to settle for a generic character. Rigging characters in other apps is something you need a dedicated specialist even to do it badly.

 

In A:M a guy like you or me can do it and get good results.

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I lived in a trailer in a small town in Mississippi. We had to borrow the tools we used. I had to work 40 hour-a-week minimum-wage jobs throughout my college years because I had to pay for what my academic scholarships did not. My parents couldn't afford to give me anything. My parents don't have college degrees and neither do my two siblings. I wasn't forced to go to college, I wanted to. To better myself. I did not view it as a "retarded creation."

 

As for the movie, I made it with my friends because I had the desire to create. I didn't *not* make a movie because I didn't have all those things you need to make one.

 

Just offering up what I see from the outside. You are, of course, welcome to sit around for three and a half years collecting excuses, but I expect very few people will be interested in watching that.

 

You can consider my observations or discount them completely, I only ask that you keep the software bashing to yourself...

 

I kinda' like A:M.

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We're glad you've got a dream! We're just trying to reframe your thinking so you can see what you've got sitting in your lap.

 

 

i wouldn't quite call it a dream, more like i just don't know what else to do sort of thing, except that I have issues with the film industry. But, this has gone way off topic.

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I cant make heads or tails of this thread!!! lol!

Rigging isnt that bad!!! As soon as you really sit down with it and test all the constriants on a small project with 2 or 3 bones you'll get the idea and strip away the mistery! (or misery lol)

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  • Hash Fellow

There was a time when you didn't need to rig your 3D models, because there was no such thing as "rigging". You animated by manually moving vertices around. If you really don't want to rig, muscle mode animation is still there for you.

 

Of course not much animation got done that way. Mostly flying logos.

 

Rigging as we know it today is a huge convenience over the old way of doing it and the A:M way is a huge convenience over anyone else's rigging scheme.

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Rigging characters in other apps is something you need a dedicated specialist even to do it badly.

 

In A:M a guy like you or me can do it and get good results.

While I definitely agree with the last part of your statement, I also completely disagree with the first part.

 

In order to keep my post from being deleted, I won't mention any specific software.

 

Way back before I bought A:M, I rigged a complete character in one program and it really wasn't much harder than doing it in A:M. It wasn't quite as intuitive, but overall the process was basically the same. I placed the bones and then I set up the controllers. I even had poses or morphs set up for the face and hands.

 

I've also played around with some demos, "personal editions", and free programs (Gotta love those CDs that come with computer magazines!!!) in which setting up a basic character rig was as easy (and in one case even easier) than A:M. On the other hand, there were also a couple of programs where I was totally lost...

 

For me it was really just a matter of learning (or trying to learn) different tools that basically did the same job. At the time I was only setting up basic bipedal human-type rigs for character models I had downloaded, but I was defiinitely no "dedicated specialist".

 

When it came time for me to finally purchase a 3D program of my own I chose A:M because I was impressed that it could do almost all the same things those other programs could do for a fraction of the cost.

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From what I can see you did a good job at positioning the rig. Your next step would be weighting cps and finishing the installation.

 

Rigging isn't that hard to do, it's something you just have to get use to, just like any other process of CG.

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