RIGGING - more work needs to be done

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#1

I think rigging in Blender is not good :cold_sweat:, it has to be put under consideration in 2.82, a newbie cannot even create a basic rig if he/she doesn’t know how to distinguish between the ‘parent’ and the ‘child’ bone, it’s really Bad and frustrating for Beginners and also professionals, that is why we have soo many bad character animation created using blender.

This is also the major reason they are not many courses and tutorials on rigging and animating characters, instead users prefare to just model or sculpt their character and their Artwork is finished. they do not ever talk about rigging them in Blender, not to mention animating because Rigging has to come before animating a character which is a Big challenge in Blender.

That is one of the major area lacking in Blender and Maya is really good at this that is why users prefer using Add-ons to simplify the rigging process or use Maya.

#rigging #python #Blender #dev

#2

Rigging is not a basic system, people cannot expect that rigging can be used in blender or any other software without external help or tutorials. I have seen people with zero experience use it perfectly with a little tutorial and rigify is a great addon that allow complex riggings.

Animation is a minority in the 3d world in all softwares. In my country we have one of the mains schools teaching blender for animation and students like it, the owner of the school is the guy that invest in create the new grease pencil tool

I see basic animation in blender like one of the strongest part of the software

4 Likes
#3

there’s Animation 2020, a project which includes Rigging
https://developer.blender.org/T68904

#4

Man, It is obvious that from newbie you lack knowledge in blender, before making requests and affirming things that are not true. you should take a peek at all the documentation existing.

#5

Hi guys, newbie from Softimage/ Maya, now learning rigging in Blender.

Blender surprise me with many feature which take a lot of setup in Maya/Softimage.
The bendy bone is super nice, taking care of the roll division, bend control, and it can dynamic change the subdivision count! And it is just one bone, single weight painting!
The stacking modifier constraint recalls Softimage rigging.
The ik system recalls my old Lightwave rigging bad memories…IK iteration? will it solve correctly? seems fine.
But it already had a builtin soft stretchy IK ready!
looking into the bone constraints, I can say the element are all ready for a decent rig.
Been Using Gear in Softimage, Mgear in Maya, written custom components for in-house requirement.
Took a look at Rigify, surprisingly it is almost ready except a few touch.

The mechanical part of rigging in blender is ready to go with the current tools I think…
Would be much better if I have a dependency graph, schematic view to look at, a spreadsheet to edit parameters

The most annoying part however is deformation.

Lacking shape linking to separate facial rig from the body rig.
Ans I need to stack up multiple envelope/skinCluster/armature and play with bind matrix to set up tweak layer after deformation.
No clues for now with the edit vs object and edit vs pose mode design in blender.

The worst experience in blender rigging is weight painting. A much better weight painting tool set must be done.
Softimage weight painting experience is the best.
Second to that is ngskin(plugin) in Maya, with the SiWeightEditor (transplant of XSI weight editor by ex-softimage user in Japan) in Maya.

Try production rig from blender cloud, They are way too heavy. ~24fps rig performance/playback is a must for production.
All rig seems to rely on mesh deform/deltamush(smoothCorrective) for the body and bendy bone for facial. Character poly-count is not too high, which means less vertices for weight painting especially true for deform cage.
Is this the reason why this weight painting part is such a case?

Precise weighting is very much needed for movie detail character like the girl from Stylized Character Workflow course.
I am looking forward to see how that character is rigged. The character is well done. The facial topology is of industry standard and I hope it will be rigged in a proper way.

So that’s my feedback on blender rigging at the moment.
I see the future is bright when everything node and animation 2020 is ready, which means a lot of complex rigging and custom deformer will become possible.

4 Likes
#6

Maybe i’m doing this wrong or maybe this is just the intended workflow because i don’t see anyone else complaining about this. But there seems to be a coupling between the Pose Editor selection and everything that I wouldn’t expect to be the case.

So this first video, unless i have the bones selected in the Pose Editor, i can’t view the Armature’s animation’s at all:

That’s a bit inconvenient, but i could understand reasons for it being intended. That’s just something i probably gotta get use to if it’s not a bug

But what seems more like a bug and really inconvenient is before you can select bones while weight painting, you have to select one of the bones in Pose Mode. If you forgot to select any of the bones, you have to leave weight painting, go to object mode, select your armature, select a bone, go to object mode, select both the mesh and the armature, then go back to weight painting. Seems a bit silly.

Searching around, i don’t see anyone else running into this. Maybe it’s just normal convention that you select all your bones before you leave Pose Mode or is this not something other people experience?

#7

@ofx360 when you do weight paint be sure that this option its disable to have the same behaviour than blender2.79
imagen
its nice for animation but for weight paint have it enable its not useful

1 Like
#8

@nokipaike https://gfycat.com/enormousdistantdassie

#9

@Guest it’s been a while and I don’t remember exactly what my comment was referring to, but I’m sure it wasn’t the rigging one, the comment was deleted from the guy who wrote it …