Geoff Bailey
made-by-geoff
About Me
EXPERTISE
CG Supervisor
INDUSTRY
Advertising / Motion Graphics | Film/TV
Houdini Skills
Availability
Not Specified
Recent Forum Posts
Quad rigging in APEX Jan. 21, 2024, 9:44 a.m.
From what I can tell from the Chicken rig, Walter is using a basic 2-bone IK to drive the hip-knee-ankle portion of the leg and then driving the ankle_ctrl with a parenting / lookat setup based on the ball_ctrl. So the ball_ctrl drives the ankle_ctrl, which is the target of a basic 2-bone IK.
Like a lot of things in the APEX beta, it will work, but it's a bit of a workaround. There are other rigging set-ups that require 3-bone spring IK setups that are more elegant and produce more natural results. Which is why I was asking, but thanks for the responses. Looking forward to future releases.
Like a lot of things in the APEX beta, it will work, but it's a bit of a workaround. There are other rigging set-ups that require 3-bone spring IK setups that are more elegant and produce more natural results. Which is why I was asking, but thanks for the responses. Looking forward to future releases.
Quad rigging in APEX Dec. 26, 2023, 2:46 p.m.
Been diving into APEX, however, most of my rigging tends to be quadruped rigging and I've hit a bit of a wall.
Haven't had as much time as I would like to expllre, but some cursory experiments seem to show that currently neither the auto-rig components nor the APEX IK solvers can handle 3-bone IK. Anyone found any way to do quadruped rigging with the current APEX nodes?
Or have suggestions about how to build a spring solver from scratch? I'd be willing to put the time in to crafting it from scratch if I understood the underlying math better. Any help would be appreciated.
Haven't had as much time as I would like to expllre, but some cursory experiments seem to show that currently neither the auto-rig components nor the APEX IK solvers can handle 3-bone IK. Anyone found any way to do quadruped rigging with the current APEX nodes?
Or have suggestions about how to build a spring solver from scratch? I'd be willing to put the time in to crafting it from scratch if I understood the underlying math better. Any help would be appreciated.
orient joints strange behavior Oct. 22, 2023, 12:07 p.m.
I'm not getting the weird offsets of the handles and joints when I open your file. Might be a bug on your system?
As for the orient joints SOP. One thing I noticed is that you are trying to use a single node for the whole skeleton, which doesn't work well on joints with multiple children. When left to consider multiple children, the node will take the average of all children to orient the parent, which is generally not what you want.
Generally you want to use one node per chain and use the "orient group" and "target group" to limit the joints that are being orients. So generally I'll set the root/COG/hip manually. Then use one node to orient the spine/torso, one for the legs, and one for the arms.
Lastly, I've said it before, but I only use procedural set up for joint orientation (and joint weighting) for BG characters and crowds. Hero characters really are better done manually. There's just too much that can go wrong down the line. Just my 2 cents.
As for the orient joints SOP. One thing I noticed is that you are trying to use a single node for the whole skeleton, which doesn't work well on joints with multiple children. When left to consider multiple children, the node will take the average of all children to orient the parent, which is generally not what you want.
Generally you want to use one node per chain and use the "orient group" and "target group" to limit the joints that are being orients. So generally I'll set the root/COG/hip manually. Then use one node to orient the spine/torso, one for the legs, and one for the arms.
Lastly, I've said it before, but I only use procedural set up for joint orientation (and joint weighting) for BG characters and crowds. Hero characters really are better done manually. There's just too much that can go wrong down the line. Just my 2 cents.