This week it’s all about working on Sticks. Which sounds much grander than it turns out to be. Remember, it is the holiday season and that means, endless distractions.
Even with all the things to tear me away from my projects, and Sticks, I did still manage a little time to work on him. It was a long week and most nights I didn’t have the brain power to stay awake long enough to figure out what the next step in rigging Sticks was to be. The couple of nights I did, I decided to work on some fairly small bits.
I was going to start with the next step which was mirroring the arm and hand bone chain over to the other side. I had a suspicion that I had missed a step in creating the hand bones and when I started watching the mirroring step I found that I was right. Fortunately I had made a note at the time so that I was able to go back to the correct video. In the video, as the person is talking about and naming the hand bones he mentions needing to link the finger roots to the hand bone. When I was doing this step, I was still renaming bones and didn’t look to see that he wasn’t just saying it was a step that needed to be done, he was doing the linking. I missed it. So that’s why when I select the hand bone and press ‘ctrl’ + ‘page down’ I wasn’t getting the fingers.
So I linked the finger roots to the hand bone and now when I select the hand bone and press ‘ctrl’ + ‘page down’ It selects the hand bone and it’s nub as well as all the finger bones.
I have decided to add finger bones to the hands even though they are blocks and thus don’t really have fingers. I figure being able to bend them a bit will add a nice touch. As I was looking at the finger bones I realized that I will need to go back to the model part of Sticks and add some edge loops to the hands to allow for that bending without funny crimping or tearing or weirdness.
So once the fingers were properly linked I started the mirror process. I selected all the bones on the left side and then using the bone tools menu I mirrored them to the other side. I don’t know if I could have used the regular mirror tool for this. It’s possible not. This did a nice job, or appears to have, of getting the thumb correct and I don’t know how well that would work with the global mirror tool.
Here you can see just the arm and hand chain for the left side.
And here I have mirrored it over to the right and recolored it so it’s easy to distinguish.
In addition to the base arm chain the IK and FK bones that I had created also had to be mirrored over. Even though there are no hand bones for those chains, I used the bone tools mirror for them as well. The nice thing was that since I already had the distance set from the first mirror, I didn’t have to change it. It was the same for the IK and FK chains. I didn’t recolor them for the new side since the more important part is if they are IK or FK chains.
Here is the FK chain mirrored.
And here is the IK chain mirrored.
They don’t look any different other than their coloring.
Of course once everything was mirrored over they all had to be renamed so the name reflects that they are the right side and not the left side.
That is all I got to work on this week. I had wanted and hoped to get more done but I knew with all I had going on, and particularly the part where my boss at the day job was out on vacation all week, that I wasn’t going to get much done. And while I have hopes for this week coming up, it is still the holiday season and there are still a few things that need to be taken care of, so as much as I would like to get the rest of the rig for Sticks completed so I can skin him to it, I don’t see that happening this week.
Still, I do intend to get something done so check back next week to see where things are at.