{"id":438,"date":"2015-10-12T20:24:38","date_gmt":"2015-10-12T20:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/avastar.online\/?page_id=438"},"modified":"2015-10-12T20:24:38","modified_gmt":"2015-10-12T20:24:38","slug":"non-human-rigging","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/reference\/non-human-rigging\/","title":{"rendered":"Non Human Rigging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><div class=\"symple-box  blue center \" style=\"text-align:left;\"> \n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0Mh7Yxbbp_4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n<div class=\"symple-toggle state-closed \"><h3 class=\"symple-toggle-trigger \">About this Document...<\/h3><div class=\"symple-toggle-container symple-clearfix\">\n<div class=\"row-fluid\">\n<div class=\"rhcol span6\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\"><strong>Content:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Create<\/strong> a Quadruped (Horse)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"rhcol span6\">\n<p>\u00a0<strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">The Video:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Editing the Avastar Skeleton into a Quadruped Skeleton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h3>What does Avastar provide?<\/h3>\n<div class=\"row-fluid\">\n<div class=\"span6 rhcol\">\n<p>Avastar basically supports the creation of animatable Models (Avatars&amp;attachments) and the creation of animations. Therefore the tool adds various functions and <span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">user interface elements<\/span> to Blender.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"span6 rhcol\">\n<p>The full functionality of Avastar can be a bit overwhelming on first sight. You should be prepared to spend some time and patience to get it all working nicely for your projects.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h3>What does this Document provide?<\/h3>\n<div class=\"row-fluid\">\n<div class=\"span6 rhcol\">\n<p>This document is a quick start into Armature Editing. In this section you will learn how to <span style=\"color: #ff6600;\"><em>prepare Avastar<\/em><\/span> for your work on non human meshes. We use a Horse as the modelling example.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"span6 rhcol\">\n<p>However this article only scratches the surface of Avastar&#8217;s feature set, so there is a lot more to detect and we invite you to make your own experiences as well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><div class='et-box et-warning'>\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class='et-box-content'>We expect that you have basic knowledge about Blender.<\/div><\/div> <\/strong><\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><\/div><\/div>\n<div class=\"row-fluid\">\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\" class=\"span12 rhcol\">If you like this video, then you may also want to take a look at our course:<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.machinimatrix.org\/lesson\/nhr-1\/\" class=\"symple-button default gold   \" target=\"_self\" title=\"Visit Site\" style=\"border-radius:3px\" rel=\"\"><span class=\"symple-button-inner\" style=\"border-radius:3px\">Non Humanoid Rigging (Lesson 1 is free)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h3>Transpose<\/h3>\n<p>Hello and Welcome back,<br \/>\nThis is an overview about the rigging of quadruped characters<br \/>\nfor the Second Life environment.<\/p>\n<p>I will give you a step-by-step introduction<br \/>\ninto the creation of a basic horse-skeleton<br \/>\nI show you in great detail how to rig the model<br \/>\ni will adjust some of the weights by using the weight-paint tools<br \/>\nand finally i will create a very simple static pose<br \/>\nfor the export to Second Life.<\/p>\n<p>so lets open Blender with the model of a horse,<br \/>\nNote that this model is also distributed within the 4th lesson of our online course: non-human-rigging,<br \/>\nand when you have purchased the course then you are also free to use the model,<br \/>\neven within your own commercial projects.<br \/>\nok, lets proceed by adding a new Avastar character into the scene.<\/p>\n<p>so to begin i recommend to move the horse to a separate layer.<br \/>\nYou can do this by first selecting the model,<br \/>\nthen pressing the &#8220;m&#8221; key<br \/>\nand select in which layer the horse shall become visible.<\/p>\n<p>Note that you later can enable or disable the visibility<br \/>\nof multiple layers by pressing the SHIFT key<br \/>\nand then click the corresponding layer icons.<\/p>\n<p>ok, our next task will be to change the default character&#8217;s skeleton into a horse skeleton.<br \/>\nHere we have to take care about some restrictions<br \/>\nwhich are imposed by the Second life animation system.<\/p>\n<p>The most important point is We can not<br \/>\nuse additional bones to improve the skeleton<br \/>\nso whatever we create here<br \/>\nit always has to use the second Life Basis bones or the Collision Volume Bones,<br \/>\nand nothing else.<\/p>\n<p>But Luckily Avastar has been designed with these restrictions in mind.<br \/>\nLets select the armature in Pose mode,<br \/>\nthen go to the tool shelf<br \/>\nopen the Avastar Tab<br \/>\nand locate the rigging panel.<\/p>\n<p>Here you find the bone visibility section.<br \/>\nThis section is currently collapsed.<br \/>\nYou can expand it by hitting the small plus sign on the left-side.<\/p>\n<p>Also by default we see a set of green control bones,<br \/>\nThese bones are mainly used to create poses<\/p>\n<p>In addition to the control bones<br \/>\nwe also have the set of blue Second Life Bones.<br \/>\nThese are the bones which later are needed to define the weight-maps for deforming the meshes.<\/p>\n<p>The blue bones and the green bones are tightly related to each other,<br \/>\nthat is: for each blue bone<br \/>\nwe have a corresponding green counterpart.<\/p>\n<p>By default only the green control bones can be moved and rotated.<br \/>\nHowever, each blue bone always follows the movements of its green counterpart.<\/p>\n<p>Later we will see that Avastar provides tools<br \/>\nfor the automatic adjustment of the Second Life bones.<br \/>\nHence we actually do not need<br \/>\nto bother with these bones at all.<br \/>\nInstead of that lets forget the blue bones for now<br \/>\nand only edit the green control bones.<\/p>\n<p>So, Lets go ahead and prepare the Avastar-character.<br \/>\nFirst of all we delete the default Avastar-meshes,<br \/>\nbecause we really do not need them for the horse.<\/p>\n<p>You can do this by navigating to the Object properties section<br \/>\nof the armature, and locate the Avastar Shape panel.<\/p>\n<p>there use the function: delete Avastar meshes.<br \/>\nbut of course you also can delete the meshes manually if you prefer.<\/p>\n<p>Now lets enable the visibility of the Horse layer.<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore, lets change the rig display as follows:<br \/>\nopen the bone display panel<br \/>\nthen from the available visibility presets select: edit.<br \/>\nThis puts the armature into edit mode<br \/>\nand it enables the visibility of most of the editable bones.<br \/>\nHowever, since we do non human character modelling<br \/>\nwe additionally have to enable another subset of bones:<br \/>\nthe extra bones.<\/p>\n<p>I can not tell it often enough, but you have to ensure<br \/>\nthat you only modify the green control bones.<br \/>\nSo, you should never touch the blue Second life Bones in edit mode.<br \/>\nAnd when i say never, then i really mean: never ever.<\/p>\n<p>If you decide to not follow this advise<br \/>\nthen i predict that you eventually will step into some serious pitfalls<br \/>\nwhen you begin to use Avastar&#8217;s and Blender&#8217;s animation tools.<\/p>\n<p>Anyways, the edit preset takes care of all of this for you<br \/>\nand now we are finally ready to edit the skeleton.<\/p>\n<p>for the begin let me move the eye target a bit closer.<br \/>\nwe will take more care of this particular bone later when we prepare the head<\/p>\n<p>Now select all visible bones by pressing the keyboard key &#8220;A&#8221;: twice.<br \/>\nand move the bones such that the horse&#8217;s hind legs<br \/>\nroughly match up with the legs of the human skeleton,<br \/>\nNow we change the human skeleton step by step into a horse skeleton.<br \/>\nFortunately blender gives us a couple of tools<br \/>\nto make our life easier here.<\/p>\n<p>First we can use the fact that the skeleton is symmetrical.<br \/>\nFor example take a look at the hip joint.<br \/>\nWhen we enable x-mirror in the tool shelf Options tab<br \/>\nthen editing a bone will automatically apply the mirrored operation<br \/>\nto the bone on the other side of the rig.<\/p>\n<p>We also must be aware that some bones hide other bones,<br \/>\nas you can see for example on the ankle bone.<br \/>\nIn this case you can always use the rubber band select,<br \/>\nby pressing &#8216;b&#8217; on the keyboard,<br \/>\nand then span the selection region over the<br \/>\njoints or bones which you want to move.<\/p>\n<p>finally, begin to move the bones into place.<br \/>\nOk, we can now move upwards along the horse legs,<br \/>\nand adjust the bones as needed.<br \/>\nYou see that i frequently switch between using the rubber band select<br \/>\nand right clicking on a joint.<\/p>\n<p>When we get up to the Center Of Gravity bone,<br \/>\nthen we have to take care a bit.<br \/>\nFirst let me select the entire upper part of the skeleton<br \/>\nand rotate it by about 90 degrees,.<\/p>\n<p>Then lets take a closer look at the pelvis bone.<br \/>\nActually you see 2 pelvis bones here,<br \/>\ncreated in opposite directions.<br \/>\nWe will keep these bones as they are,<br \/>\nwe only select the end joints of both bones,<br \/>\nand move them a bit towards the horse&#8217;s back.<br \/>\nThis will later become relevant,<br \/>\nwhen we get to animation.<\/p>\n<p>And lets make the Center Of Gravity bone bigger,<br \/>\nso that we can grab it easily<br \/>\nwhen we later animate the horse.<\/p>\n<p>Now lets continue to adjust the upper part of the skeleton.<br \/>\nAgain i frequently switch between grabbing a single joint,<br \/>\nand using the rubber-band-select,<br \/>\nwhen i want to select or deselect multiple joints or bones at the same time.<\/p>\n<p>It is also good to adjust the eye target now.<\/p>\n<p>Up till now i have only worked in side-view.<br \/>\nNow lets adjust the hind legs in back-view.<br \/>\nYou can enable back view by first pressing the control key,<br \/>\nand then select front view on the number pad.<\/p>\n<p>Now lets hide the hind legs for a moment,<br \/>\nso that we can concentrate on the front legs.<br \/>\nand lets switch to front-view.<\/p>\n<p>Lets first adjust the eyes location.<br \/>\nIt is a bit tricky to actually select a bone when it is in front of another bone.<br \/>\nSo lets move out of front view for a moment<br \/>\nthen select the eye bone<br \/>\nand get back to front view and adjust the eyes as needed<\/p>\n<p>And then adjust the arm bones to the horse&#8217;s front legs.<br \/>\nHere, take care to also move the tails of the somewhat hidden collar-link bones.<\/p>\n<p>Finally go back to side view<br \/>\nand adjust the bones from there as well.<\/p>\n<p>finally, unhide the hind legs again,<br \/>\nand here it is Our horse skeleton is ready for usage.<\/p>\n<p>well, no, not yet.<br \/>\nUntil now we have only worked on the green animation bones.<\/p>\n<p>Now it is time to take care again about the Blue Second Life bones.<br \/>\nSo lets enable their visibility.<br \/>\nYou see they are still arranged as a human skeleton,<br \/>\nso we now need to synchronize the blue bones with the edits of the green ones.<br \/>\nBut don&#8217;t worry, we have a function for this.<br \/>\nOpen the tool shelf and search for the deform bone constraints panel<br \/>\nand there click on: &#8220;snap Base to Rig&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Ok, on first sight it looks like the SL bones have been deleted,<br \/>\nbut actually they only have been snapped to the control bones.<br \/>\nWe can see much better what happens when we enter pose mode<\/p>\n<p>oh. this doesn&#8217;t look as expected<br \/>\nwe still see a big clutter even after we hide the SL Bones.<br \/>\nWell, we can disable the bone shapes so that the green control bones are drawn as octahedral.<\/p>\n<p>And we can disable the display of the rotation limit guidelines.<br \/>\nNow we can see clearly that the green bones and the blue bones<br \/>\nare located at the same place, and all is well.<\/p>\n<p>now lets move on to our final task,<br \/>\nnamely rigging the horse and making an initial pose.<\/p>\n<p>So lets go to object mode,<br \/>\nselect the armature and the horse<br \/>\nand then lookup the Bind-to-Armature function<br \/>\nin the skinning panel of the tool shelf.<br \/>\nNote that we prepare a simple parenting without any weight copy,<br \/>\nBecause actually we do not have any mesh<br \/>\nfrom where we could copy weights.<br \/>\nSo lets use the keep-option here,<br \/>\nwhich does not touch the weight tables<br \/>\nduring the parenting operation<\/p>\n<p>Now it is time for weighting the model.<br \/>\nSelect the horse,<br \/>\nopen the tool shelf<br \/>\nand locate the rigging panel.<br \/>\nThere, select the skin preset from the preset list.<\/p>\n<p>This will put the horse into weight paint mode<br \/>\nand the armature into pose mode.<br \/>\nFurthermore the blue Second Life Base bones have been made visible<br \/>\nand the green control bones have been hidden.<br \/>\nand finally, the rotation constraints which tie the blue bones to the<br \/>\ngreen bones have been disabled. And all of this is done on purpose:<\/p>\n<p>Remember that the blue Second Life Base bones are responsible<br \/>\nfor the skeletal animation of the character. because of that<br \/>\nthese bones are also named deform bones.<br \/>\nAnd the character mesh needs to cary the weighting tables for<br \/>\nthese deform bones.<\/p>\n<p>Hence we now have to leave the green animation control bones aside<br \/>\nand concentrate only on the blue bones instead.<\/p>\n<p>so, lets now generate our initial weight maps as follows:<br \/>\nBegin by selecting all blue bones except the eye bones.<br \/>\nPlease take care here because it is not so easy to see<br \/>\nif the eye bones are selected or not.<br \/>\nand now generate the weights by calling<br \/>\nWeights, Assign automatic from bones.<\/p>\n<p>Blender will now preset the weights to reasonable initial values.<br \/>\nYou can do a quick check by selecting individual bones<br \/>\nand examine how the weight maps are defined.<\/p>\n<p>At the very end we have to check whether the weighting is good for our purposes.<br \/>\nWhen we now rotate the skeleton bones<br \/>\nthen we can check for obvious weighting-errors,<br \/>\nand fix them as needed.<\/p>\n<p>Well, when we bend the head<br \/>\nthen we might see some issues with the vertices around the eyes.<br \/>\nThere we sometimes find some unweighted vertices.<br \/>\nWe can fix this quickly by weighting these vertices to the head bone.<br \/>\nFor this purpose we open the Tools-tab within the tool shelf,<br \/>\nthere we select the add brush,<br \/>\npreset the strength and the weight to a value of about 0.2,<br \/>\nand then carefully paint onto the visible spikes,<br \/>\nuntil they snap back to the head.<\/p>\n<p>Now we can proceed to the next step,<br \/>\nnamely animating our character.<br \/>\nHowever, since this tutorial is only about rigging,<br \/>\nlets just do a simple horse pose,<br \/>\nand verify that the rig works as expected.<\/p>\n<p>but first and very important<br \/>\nlets select the pose preset from the rigging bone control panel.<br \/>\nIf we forget to do this<br \/>\nthen the green control bones remain decoupled from the blue bones,<br \/>\nwhich is certainly not what you want.<br \/>\nwell, what you actually do want<br \/>\nis to disable the custom shapes, because they are optimized for human character animation.<br \/>\nAnd of course you want to enable x-ray mode, otherwise the control bones will be mostly hidden inside the model.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, switch over to the armature<br \/>\nand create the pose in the same way as we created human poses in the past.<\/p>\n<p>Please note that for some bones you will see<br \/>\nthe original constraints no longer work well.<br \/>\nThese bones can no longer be bended in a natural way.<br \/>\nThis is due to the bone constraints, which still are<br \/>\nmade for a human skeleton. If you want to know how<br \/>\nto adjust this in an optimal way,<br \/>\nthen please check out our course<br \/>\nabout non human character modelling.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime We can fix this issue quickly by disabling<br \/>\nthe constraints of the currently selected bones,<br \/>\nfrom within the properties sidebar of the 3D-view.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, we even can select all bones at once<br \/>\nand disable all constraints by one click.<\/p>\n<p>Now lets go ahead and finish our simple pose.<\/p>\n<p>And finally, when the pose is finished,<br \/>\nselect all bones and then press the &#8220;i&#8221; key,<br \/>\nto create a new key frame.<br \/>\nYou want to select locrot here.<\/p>\n<p>And at the very end<br \/>\ngo to the render properties section<br \/>\nand export the pose as a second life animation.<\/p>\n<p>By now we can only create a static pose,<br \/>\nbecause we have defined just one single frame.<\/p>\n<p>And we will define an infinite loop,<br \/>\nsuch that the horse keeps in that pose as long as<br \/>\nthe pose is active.<\/p>\n<p>when we finally upload the model to Second Life,<br \/>\nthen we have to take care about 2 things.<\/p>\n<p>first when you show weights in the previewer<br \/>\nyou see the front legs get crossed.<br \/>\nThis is so, because the previewer uses the default stand-pose for a human character.<\/p>\n<p>But we have modified the orientation of the arms<br \/>\nwhen we bended them downwards in blender to create the front legs.<\/p>\n<p>We will see in a moment that this issue will be solved<br \/>\nas soon as we upload our own stand pose.<\/p>\n<p>The other point is: Whenever we have modified the Skeleton,<br \/>\nthen we also must import joint positions.<br \/>\nWhen we forget to do that, then our mesh will deform in unpredictable ways<br \/>\nwhen it is worn.<\/p>\n<p>So, lets now wear the mesh.<br \/>\nOf course we again see the crossed front legs.<br \/>\nSo, lets also import the pose.<br \/>\nand we see as long as the pose plays,<br \/>\nthe front legs do what they are supposed to do.<\/p>\n<p>So, that&#8217;s all that i wanted to show you in this tutorial.<br \/>\nBut we are not yet at the end of all possibilities.<br \/>\nThat is: You can also configure Avastar&#8217;s I-K-Rig for your horse, dog, fish,<br \/>\nor for any other non human shapes.<br \/>\nIf you want to learn more about how to get the most out<br \/>\nof Avastar, then please consider to purchase our advanced<br \/>\ntutorial &#8220;non-human-rigging&#8221; for Second Life.<\/p>\n<p>The advanced tutorial contains an extended version<br \/>\nof this video tutorial with many<br \/>\nmore tips and tricks,<br \/>\na detailed description about customizing the Rig<br \/>\nand a commercially usable blend file of this horse model.<\/p>\n<p>Thank you for watching this video<br \/>\nand have a nice day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Transpose Hello and Welcome back, This is an overview about the rigging of quadruped characters for the Second Life environment. I will give you a step-by-step introduction into the creation of a basic horse-skeleton I show you in great detail how to rig the model i will adjust some of the weights by using the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":620,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-438","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","category-reference"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/438\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avalab.org\/avastar\/legacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}