I have a character that I want to Rig and having some trouble. I have walked through the Quad example, but when I get to my character I can never get the mesh to “sitck” to the rig. Is there any other tutorials or alternative ways to rig a character? Just as an FYI I am rigging this character for use in Torque as opposed to simple animations - not sure it really maters.

I haven't checked in some time. I found the AutoRig system to, yes, export to DTS, but I found some issues with the ‘rig’/hierarchy it constructed with the render/'export' process. I'll try to explain my observations:

By nature, this ‘AutoRig’ system seems to use a ‘control’ object/rig to drive the ‘deforming’ rig which is interacting with the mesh object. This means that there are a few ‘objects’ in the Scene to ‘render’/export. You can select what object to export, this is where the “gotcha” comes in.

When I exported the mesh deforming rig and it's associated ‘mesh’, I did indeed get a mesh, with materials, bound to a ‘hierarchy’. However; it was not the ‘hierarchy’ I desired.

The rig that exported with the textured mesh, was not in a hierarchy of ‘branches’, with Parent/Child relationships. I got a single ‘Parent’ node and many, many Child nodes; and there was no interconnection/chain between the ‘branches’ as you would ‘expect’ to get. A ‘hieracrhy’ of chains. With AutoRig, you get a single ‘chain’….one Parent, with every other node a direct ‘child’ of this one Parent. This may seem ‘okay’ on the surface…

Now, you have this mesh bound to this odd rig…it DOES run any animation created by this setup and put to this particular rig. If you wish to manipulate this hierarchy ‘procedurally’ inside the engine, this ‘un-connectedness’ of the ‘children’, won't translate all of the nodes correctly, it would move the ONE ‘parent’ of a branch, but not any of it's ‘expected’ children,, since there is not direct Parenting to a node's ‘logical’ parent, just all nodes to a single ‘root’ node, B'ah, that ain't gonna work….outside HD.

I would perhaps try to ‘build a rig’ from the ground up, complete with IK setups, out of the native HD, ‘bones’ and use this as a ‘deforming’ rig and control rig, or roll your own “AutoRig” setup. My previous attempts with FBX Import were not stellar, to get a working rig to start with, it did something similar to what I was seeing upon ‘render’. Many single unconnected nodes to the ‘root’ of the shape. I could not get the native IK to work with just ‘joints’ and no ‘bones’ in the shape. At this point I had to move onto other pressing projects and haven't looked at this feature any further; perhaps things have changed since I was evaluating the render Node…

Hope this helps, I'd love to hear how the system works for you…

Cheers!
Rex

PS: I did follow the Quadra Ped autorig video, there is a portion where the video quality lags and you don't get a dropdown menu appearing correctly to show to get the parameters to the other node. Once I got passed that, I did get the quadra ped to function correctly. I then interpolated this video to a ‘human’ biped autoRig and that worked just as well as a control setup, but not a good TORQUE render/export.

I would follow any ‘groundUp’ tutorials on rigging…and leave autoRig alone for now??

@DrFrankenRex,

Thanks.. That was exactly what I was thinking. Just start out with a new rig. I think what I need to do is study the process a little more and create a new Autorig as soon I will have a few Characters to rig other than just this one.

Thanks… If I get it to work will let you know

Man, 3D Buzz released a well explained rigging tutorial. Check this out.

http://www.3dbuzz.com/xcart/product.php?productid=71 [3dbuzz.com]

Cheers,

Thanks,

I have not been impressed with the 3DBuzz tutorials - yet. At least from the ones I can listen too on thier site. There should be enough documentation out there to do what I need. But if not I may resort to one of thier vids.