Open Sourcing

he basic Marty rig is complete! It was fairly easy to rig him because I didn't have to add a whole bunch of constraints or any shape keys like I did with Bone. I could probably go back and limit the rotation of some of the bones in order to make sure they won't intersect with any of the body pieces, but it seems sort of unnecessary.

I worked on a walk cycle for Marty last night and managed to come up with the following:

Marty Walk Cycle from Tim Brown on Vimeo.

For the most part I followed the ManCandy DVD walk cycle tutorials. They are very detailed, so if you plan on making a walk cycle I highly recommend them.

I ran into an odd thing when converting the walk cycle action to an NLA strip. I converted the action over, then repeated it 10 times. Doing this will make him take 10 steps, but unless you specify an offset bone to follow, he will take those 10 steps starting from the same point each time, which is not what I wanted. I wanted him to take steps forward. The offset bone I selected is the Spine1 bone, but for some reason he was leaving his right foot behind as he walked off! If was quite funny to watch, but was wrong obviously! I had to create a Master bone and parent Spine1, along with both feet bones to it. That is why you see those dashed lines sticking out of the back of him during his walk. It works fine now, but it was curious why only the right foot was left behind and not both feet? They are setup the exact same way?

he basic bones for my Marty rig are completed now and to test him out I gave him a little Macbeth pose. I ran across just a few things that I'll most likely end up changing. The first thing is that his shoulders are pretty limited on how far they can move without intersecting the body mesh. I'll probably end up making the shoulder hole a bit bigger and changing the pivot point for the upper arm bone to try to fix this a bit. Otherwise he'll be running around with really wide arms all the time! The second thing I'll have to play around with is sort of a basic way to move all his bones at once. I created his rig without following any tutorials or notes (which I'm excited about!) and I forgot to add a root, or master bone. This sounds like it should be easy, but I was running into some troubles with parenting what to what and leaving some bones behind when grabbing and moving the whole armature.

The next couple of pictures were just some photos that I had on my computer that I decided to play with in Gimp. They were both taken last year at the Cherry Blossom festival in Washington, DC. This one on the left was meant to look like an old vintage photo that has been lying around for many years. Increasing the contrast a bit, along with adjusting the color curves gives it that worn look and then I just added some fading to black in the corners.

The photo below I think came out pretty well and really looks like the result I was hoping for. This one was made to look like a still image from a scene in a movie (if you click on it you'll see a bigger version). Enjoy!

started rigging Marty the robot last night and completed a basic spine. After watching the rigging part of Creature Factory I realized that I probably should have made each sphere and cylinder a separate object, allowing me to simply parent each object to the corresponding bone. This is what Andy does for his Creature and it seems a bit easier than creating a separate vertex group for each bone. I wasn't about to split them all up after modeling was finished, so I'll stick with vertex groups for now.

I also did a quick rigging test to see how the ball and stick joints would look and I'm pretty happy with it. The animation below is obviously very simple, but it shows how the arms, legs, and spine parts should look.

fter an extremely exciting and wonderful weekend ;-), I did manage to get the hands modeled on Marty the robot last night during the Giants game. I tried to keep the major part of the hand fairly simple for rendering speed purposes, so it's pretty boxy, but I think it looks fine. It's tough to estimate the size of the hand when it's out like in this pose, so I may need to adjust that when I start to move him around.

I'm pretty excited to start rigging him. I've never done any rigging of an inorganic model before. It seems a bit easier at first because you don't have to take in to account how the mesh deforms (there is no deformation), but the constraints may be a bit harder to configure. The Creature Factory DVD by renowned Blender artist Andy Goralczyk, has a section in it about rigging the creature, which is sort of inorganic. Andy really is a great artist and the DVD shows all of the work he went through to create a short film all in Blender. I wouldn't expect to come close to anything that he can do, but something similar to it may be a fun project to tackle in the future.

quick Christmas wish to get you in the spirit of the season! Made quickly in Gimp last night, enjoy!

o modeling updates today, Marty still needs hands. I did get a chance to play around with the material settings though. I added a nice shiny chrome-like material for the cylinders and a shiny blue material for the body and spheres. There is a color ramp, ray mirror, and a slight texture going on, so quite a bit more complicated then it looks. Hope you like it!