Here a some suggestions for the Character Animation Systems.
DownloadPDF

saludos!!!
Anubis4d fron Argentina

really nice proposal. You should send it to the bf-funboard mailing list !
but all those capitalized words are really annoying, you should remove those randomes caps before sending it
otherwize i totally agree with your proposal !!
_________________
My Portfolio :: www.mentalwarp.com/~fred/

I think rotation limits are out of date.
Better control can be achieved with pole vector contraints.

I agree with joeri, pole vector constraint is the best way to control a IK chain.

My two cents,
Gustavo Muñoz

from what I read "pole vector constraint" is similar to ( in blender ) creating a second IK target for the chain, i.e. for a leg setup, create a "kneeIK" bone and place it in front of the knee, and make an IK constraint from the calf bone to this target. The knee will point at the target.
The problem in blender may be that this doesn't fully control Y axis rotation- but it is usually fine for organic characters.

I don´t like rotation constraints, when you animate you don´t want to be limited in how much or in wich direction you can rotate a bone, (only in Y in your leg example) What I do is create a "Track To" constraint to the bone that has his tip in the midle of the chain.

Also having controlers like boxes, emties, an all kind of stuff that is outside the armature object is a bad idea because you can´t use the entire rig as an object in NLA. In Maya they rig using all kind of other objects and then they make a "character set" to solve the problem of to many objects without any relation but that can be avoided having a good set of handlers available in the armature object.

Quote:

A LINK CONTROL is needed,I mean a way to ANIMATE the way a object links to other, for example: a drunk man grabs a glas,drinks,and then drops it (the glass falls) and the drunk grabs the bottle.

That´s entirely posible using IPO curves for the constraints

I think you should lern a bit more about blender and character animation in general, the way animators work and think (especialy cartoon animation)

See you

pd.: espero que no te enojes conmigo, me encantaria hablar contigo por messenger o algo, mi correo es zanqdot@hotmail.com

1.st I think rotation limiting can be very usefull. I often use it when the Up vector method can not be used. In XSI, there are 2d and 3d chains, while only those which are 2d can be controlled by an up vector.
That's because in a 3d chain, not all bones are on the same plane.
Rotation limiting is very helpful in cases when the IK can not decide on which side to bend a knee/ there are cases when the up vector is useless for this. Also with this method, you have one object less to animate

2. In other softwares, armatures and all kind of rigging objects are selectable with all other types of objects, that means the armature structure is not sepparate- that's like hooks work by now. I personally like to use emties or boxes to controll the armature in blender- what is annoying, i have 2 places where to animate(object level and armature level, sometimes the RVKs come to it and you can get crazy).
What i proposed was to discard the armature structure(make bones objects, like empties or meshes). That would also discard action object.

These would be replaced by an "actor" structure, which would be a group of objects(bones and helpers, parented to some root empty) which would have a common animation, so that the actions could be made of it for mixing in NLA.

pildanovak wrote:

1.st I think rotation limiting can be very usefull. I often use it when the Up vector method can not be used. In XSI, there are 2d and 3d chains, while only those which are 2d can be controlled by an up vector. That's because in a 3d chain, not all bones are on the same plane. Rotation limiting is very helpful in cases when the IK can not decide on which side to bend a knee/ there are cases when the up vector is useless for this. Also with this method, you have one object less to animate

I think up vector is different from pole vector.
And knee flipping is better controlled with polevector contraint then with rotation limiting. You don't need to animate the polevector constraint, just parent it to the bones root. If the IK cannot decide which side to flip (this does not happen with a pole vector 'cause that's telling the IK which of 2 solutions to choose) a rotation limit will not help you, it will stop the rotation going further then the given limit, rather then choosing the other IK solution.

zanqdo, no me enojo; pero creo que tengo una idea de como los animadores piensan y trabajan, ya que uso programas de animacion 3D desde hace mas de 10 años, aunque tal vez si muuuchos de los usuarios NUEVOs de blender e inclusos los desarrolladores desean que se puedan controlar mejor los personajes; y el modelo que veo en las paginas de desarrrolllo es similar a otros programas, tal vez NO SOLO YO SEA UN OGNORANTE, a lo mejor tu forma de animar (como la de muchos) este acorde al sistema actual, aunque no se por que los desarrolladores hacen todo lo contrario, y desarrollar herramientasa mas similares a maya y a softimage.

Perhaps there are many ways to control IK chains (armatures) apparently more than me, wich of course becomes an honor to be iluminated with your wisdom. But you really think that the current blender rigging system is better than MAYA`ss or Softimage`s ? maybe YOU don`t know more than the MAYA, and SOFTIMAGE developers about how animators work and think.

My sugestions, are based on my personal knowledge (or according to some of you: my ingnorance) respect to the rewriting of blender RIGGING system, I think that the current system MUST REMAIN THERE and with some (I think) minor modifications, work more like other kind of RIGGING (used by all the res uf us, I mean former MAX, LIGTHWAVE, SOFTIMAGE and MAYA users) wich I think works fine, don`t you?.

I will keep my mouth shut, in front of all you WISDOM, please forgive this poor ingnorant.

Marcos Daniel Caballero
Pixel Productions
Mar del Plata - Argentina