Need Help Rigging Megaman/Cyborg
 

Hey I'm trying to rig megaman, but I made him half organic half hardsurface and I'm stuck on how to rig him.

I thought about parent constraining the hard surfaces, but then I'm left with the joints inbetween that I want to be able to deform, so how would I go about in doing this? As for the rubbers around the sockets, I want to be able to deform it when I'm moving, but I also want it to stay sewn around the socket, but it keeps moving. Tell me how you guys would do this. I can't seem to get it to work the way I want it to.

Here's an attached picture to give you an idea. I'm also going to be using set driven keys for the rockets' propellers.

W/out Rockets

That's a really nice model you've got going there, v.impressive

I'm not really a rigger by heart so can't really offer to much advice, but one suggestion would be to skin the organic and hard body surfaces seperately. Firstly smooth skinning the organic body parts and then skinning the hard body surface using rigid bind and fiddling with the membership of the vertices to all the joints to bend.

Hope this helps in anyway. And if anyone has a better suggestion, please feel free to tell me that i'm wrong. :)

I agree; bind the soft skin and weight them then constrain the hard surfaces to the joints. If you want to bind the hard surfaces as well, you could paint their weights onto a single bone so that they will not deform when the joints around them rotate.

To make things easier on yourself, you could put the hard surfaces on a seperate layer than the soft surfaces so you can turn them off.


I like the rig you made!


edit::: Is the model one piece? I don't think so but if it is then you can still bind it using soft skin then paint the weights so that the hard surfaces are ONLY being influenced by a single bone and then make the rubber surfaces weighted between 2 or more bones so that it stretches when the joint bends.

Hey thanks guys, I'll give these a try. Rostoon I checked out your project, it looks really cool, hope we get to see that vid soon. :)
And velusion, your sculptures are awesome, you do this professionally?

And nope, this model isn't one piece, its a bunch of different pieces, so I can easily combine them. I'll try both ways.

I noticed when I painted the hard surfaces all white, when I tried to move it, it was stuck in place and wouldn't move. Am I doing something wrong here? Or when you paint everything white it wont move at all?

painting weights a nightmare, its making me wanna cry.lol

I don't quite understand it completely yet. Does edges(topology) affect the weights? It seems to move the surface when I change the pose.

When you paint weights I guess you already know that you have to choose a bone from the list in the paint window so that Maya knows which bone you are weighting the skin to. Yes, white means you are painting weight. Black means there is no weight. If the skin is moving when you bend a joint it means that the skin is being influenced by more than 1 joint. If the skin is painted white yet it doesn't move then maybe something is turned off. I'm not sure what though.

here's the thing about weights; The weight is located at the vertices and has a value of1. 1 is completely white. 0 is completely black and all values inbetween 1 and 0 are a mix between black and white. If you have a spot on your model that stretches when you move a joint it means that the total value of the weight is split up between 2 or more joints. Maybe each joint has .333 for its weight value. You can look at the weight values by going into component mode. You can even edit them manually. The piant tool that you use to paint the weights is just an easy way to apply the weights. Instead of typing numbers, you paint white.

One more note to confuse you some more, the skin weight value MUST always equal 1 if it is to stay completely bound to the skeleton. So, for example, if the weight for all vertices is .5 then you moved the skeleton, the skin would follow, but not completely. Anyway, this is the point I'm trying to get to; if you adjust the weight up or down while you have a certain joint selected, the weight that you are painting is coming from another joint. If you are subtracting white from a joint that means that the weight value is being placed on another joint so that everything equals 1. You can put a HOLD on joints so that their value doesn't change but I'll leave that for you to figure out. Also, just because you don't see any white on a certain area of the skin, it doesn't mean that there are no weight values there. If a spot of skin has weight values like .01 then It might still look black even though there are weights there. This will cause the skin to move even though you can't see the weight influence. Maya has a cropping tool to delete really low weight values.

Weighting the skin can be frustrating but you shouldn't give up.

It took me a while to really understand painting weights when I was first starting out, but it'll come with time.

Ah that was confusing. Now I understand why there arent many high detailed models flying around full animated.lol