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Need A Smooth Serpentine Rig


jamochawoke
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Hey guys I have modified one of the races to create a particular monster that has a long serpentine neck. I am using Blender for this particular project because I still haven't gotten around to learning 3DS Max yet (I own it even, my time is just reallllly tight). However, if there is an easy solution in 3DS Max by all means let me know!

However, while I'm not new to animating I am kind of new to the process of rigging (I can animate already rigged models just fine).

I set up several more neck bones by stretching out Bip01 Neck1 and then subdivided that bone into 8 bones for a neck that can move kind of snakelike.

I then, as a test, extruded the top of Robert's male body neck over those bones and then assigned the areas that were next to the bones as a vertex group.

My problem is now when I go into pose mode to see how the rigging went I've run into several problems. The biggest right now is the neck kind of squashes up into itself as it is bent one way or another. If I make an S-curve the problem is really awful as you can see here:

blenderriggingproblems.jpg

Edited by jamochawoke
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My guess would be that your neck mesh is weighted incorrectly; the vertices are parented to bones at a strength you don't want.

So in Blender, you'll find there's a vertex group for every bone. If you go into weightpaint mode, you can get a visualisation of the degree to which all the vertices are affected by each bone by selecting the corresponding vertex group. If I had to guess, I'd say that all the neck mesh is still weighted to the base of the neck.

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Ok I checked it out and they are all weighted to the base of the neck so I removed those vertices from the vertex group of the base of the neck that weren't supposed to be there. I was still having the squashing problem though.

I did check their weights and they are all Red (weight of 1.0 in edit mode). Should I have them as a different weight to achieve a better rig? What weight should I be aiming for or is it more of a gradual thing?

Sorry if the questions are too noob, I always just used the bone weight copy when making new armors and such.

Edited by jamochawoke
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I think you may find this useful. Basically "weight" is the degree to which a vertex will be affected by a bone. Red is a weight of 1, or 100 percent, which means that any way that bone transforms, so does that vertex. Blue is zero percent, and means it will be unaffected.

As I said, every bone has it's own vertex group, so you'll need to paint for every bone. Luckily, most of the mesh is already weighted for you; you just need to make sure each segment of the neck is unnaffected by all bones other than the nearest ones.

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I guess I'll just assign a weight of 25% to each bone vertex group in the neck and see what happens from there.

I downloaded someone's shark rigging that they had done (although I think they may have rigged it in 3DS Max as it's completely unfamiliar to me how they did the bones) but I did see how they weight painted it and most of the weights were 25% or less with a few spots having the darker 100% and 80% (orangeish) with a gradiant from those to the 25% (light greenish blue).

I have some time tonight so I'll see what I can do and upload an image of the results :thumbup:

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Ok here is the results of removing the extra weights from unnecessary bones that happened when I extruded that part of the mesh and also assigning a weight of .25 to the mesh around the relevant bones.

blenderriggingproblems2.jpg

As you can see there is still a lot of crunching of the mesh. What do I need to do to prevent this? I was looking at some other meshes and they have some small overlaps with their weights, but trying that didn't do much.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think overlapping your weights is the way to go. It will stop each portion of the neck from moving independantly, which is what's causing your hard transitions. I'd try .5 from the main bone, and .25 each from the adjacent bones above and below as a starting point, then tweak by eye. Oblivion requires all vertices to be weighted to 1 (100%) total between the bones affecting them, if you leave it with only 1 bone influencing the vertex it will get set to a weight of 1 automaticly by the exporter.

Rigging can be a tedious process but it looks like your almost there. :thumbup:

WT

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Hey thanks was just checking back in to see if anyone had a solution. I've more or less found a working rig by doubling the bones and cleaning up the neck (the Robert's neck area is actually kind of a mess) mesh into more loop-type structure. I didn't however, know about the engine needing them all to be assigned as weight 1 when added up so I will definitely keep that in mind and go back and re-weight them properly for the engine! Should probably save me some big future headache. Once I get the rig working 100% I can manipulate the model some more with the sculpting tools to add neck muscles and... other various stuff (this creature is kind of a big secret, but he's going to be some kind of chimera haha!)

Edited by jamochawoke
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