Rigged Character…

y Bone character is coming along nicely. I have been working over the past week on building up an armature for him. This is the first character that I have modeled and rigged from scratch, so I’m quite happy with it.

The rig is based on a few different rigs that I have studied including ManCandy, Captain Blender, and the BSoD Character Animation tutorial rig. The body controls are very basic right now, but as I learn more about building an armature I am adding more functionality.

The hand/finger rig is based on ManCandy’s hands. This was quite tricky to get right as Bone has very short, fat fingers. They tend to deform badly when curled in a fist, which is one of the things that I have to work on. Each finger as two bones (one knuckle) that control the deformation of the mesh. Each of them has a small IK target at the tip of the finger which controls the bending of the finger. This small bone is parented to a large bone that does all the controlling. Scaling this large bone will bend the finger and rotating it will control the position of the finger. This allows me to control each finger with just one bone and un-clutters the workspace (I can hide all the rest of the finger bones).

Bone’s eyebrows are controlled with two shape keys, one for each side. With the shape key fully on his eyebrows are down, as if thinking or mad. I used a combination of Captain Blender and ManCandy resources to create these keys. It was sort of a pain to move a slider around to control the eyebrows, so I decide to drive the shape keys with a single bone.

Blender Bone Driven Eyebrows from Tim Brown on Vimeo

I think that it came out really nice. The one bone (with a custom shape, which is a first for me!) in the center drives both eyebrows based on its local X and Y locations. It is really easy to pose! BTW, the demo video above was made in CamStudio. The captions were added with CamStudio in real time. They aren’t the prettiest looking boxes out there, but very simple to use.

There you have it, Bone is coming along! I still need to complete the hand rigs as only his left hand is done right now. I’d like to also add the ability to make his body/head stretchable, along with some more custom bone shapes to clean up the posing environment.