13-10-2007
Mancandy 1.0 , Mancandy 2.0 and Mancandy 2.1
I suppose I should explain. 1.0 is the old dude I originally posted on the elephants dream website. Should work fine on blender 2.45, but check and report. Mancandy 2.0 is my current “blessed” version, works on blender 2.45. 2.1 is an interim release, made to remain compatible with blender SVN (for those who like the bleeding edge)
Have fun kiddies.
EDIT: I just re-uploaded the 2.0 file with the armature visible (and selectable) by default. As the comment indicates, hide it if you intend to use mancandy as a library file and link the group, otherwise, leave it visible.
Sorry for the confusion.
13-10-2007 at 5:23 am
Thank you for the updated rig, Bassam, I will be studying this again :) I am really impressed with the animation you put together to illustrate the new controls, and I am hoping to be able to animate this soon! Thanks again!
13-10-2007 at 8:06 am
Oh no… I’ve been so blind… we all have been so blind!
Can’t you see it, guys? He’s breeding an army! A master race of Mancandy soldiers!
I wouldn’t be surprised if this devious renegade mastermind would came out with more agitprop material soon… mark my words!
17-10-2007 at 12:39 am
That’s Fantastic that it works with SVN now. I was setting up a little scene with Mancandy in blender 2.45 then opened it in a SVN version and Mancandy’s jaw was droped to the floor. like he was shocked and dumbfound. It was fairly comical.
18-10-2007 at 1:46 am
[...] A big thank you for sharing your knowledge and time with all of us. I know I've learned a lot by taking apart Bassam's creations. Make sure to visit his site or the Blenderartist thread about the release to thank him. [...]
18-10-2007 at 3:06 am
Soooooooooooooooo Cool.
18-10-2007 at 4:24 am
Cool. Cheers for the openness.
18-10-2007 at 5:12 am
Thanks bassam for this, it’s good to see a good blender rig. Thanks again!
18-10-2007 at 7:30 am
Thanks a lot … now I’ve got no excuse for not trying character animation!
18-10-2007 at 8:17 am
I have got to download this asap (whoah, too bad, already did that!) and do some character animation practice with him. After that, I promise I will slice him up good and proper to learn all his rigging secrets…hahahahaha :)
Make sure you submit this to the blender model repository! It is a must-have for everybody:
http://e2-productions.com/repository/
18-10-2007 at 5:15 pm
Dion, good idea. LoMac, yeah, I always find that a little funny (when I open the wrong version of mancandy in the wrong version of blender). Luckily, I use linked groups a lot, which means I can fix things by editing the library path. Have fun everybody, and Jan, stay tuned for more evil ManCandy AgitProp!
18-10-2007 at 6:01 pm
Hello.
I have problems with this version, i downloaded the 2.0 version for my blender 2.45 and when I open the file i just have the mesh but no more(where is the armature?).
Thanks for help!.
18-10-2007 at 10:56 pm
I just quietly uploaded a fix - redownload 2.0 ; the armature will be visible and selectable. In general, you want an invisible armature if you want to link the mancandy group into a file, and a visible one (duh!) if you want to animate in the file.
19-10-2007 at 4:51 am
Hello,
anyone else having problems with moving the hands? Seems like selecting and then moving hand shape has no effect? Should I do something special there? Movig FK/IK slider also seems to have no effect …
Thanks for any hint!
The version of Blender I’m using is 2.45 (tried both Mac & Linux versions) and Mancandy 2.0 (latest available right now)
-AntonG
19-10-2007 at 9:53 am
Hi AntonG, you probably mean the IK controls. you have to have the action MCdriven active for that to work; I just re-upped 2.0 with that on. Generally I don’t like to do this when I’m linking.. it’s one of those things that is better if you’re going to use the file and not when you link. So redownload and let me know.
There also appears to be a bug in blender- under some circumstances, the drivers stop updating, and the blending appears not to work. I have a workaround for that; I’ll post it in detail in another post.
19-10-2007 at 11:13 pm
Thanks Bassam,
There are so many bones, I just made them all visible on from the outliner…
Awesome!!! however I find it a bit confusing.. which bones should I pay attention on? Is there an online instruction?
21-10-2007 at 4:08 pm
Hi Bassam,
yes, now the hand IK control works ( IK slider must be enabled of course ).
What confuses me, e.g. if I move the hand with the IK control (IK slider is completely enabled) and then in a few next frame I move the body, the hand stretches as I would expect, now after a next few frames I disable IK slider, the hand now moves to “default reset” position” … now if I play complete animation, the stretching of the hand is gone in between animtion … I guess I don’t know how to properly use IK slider within single animation … anyhow, the rig controls are great and I hope DVD explaining all this mystery will be available soon …
Great work, and thanks!
-AntonG
23-10-2007 at 8:02 am
broken sword: the bones in armature layers 1 through 10 are for control; the bones in the other layers are part of the rig.
AntonG, if you don’t key the slider, the hand is either in IK for the entire animation, or in FK for the entire animation (unless autokeying is on). I found constraint blending a little buggy. sometimes, it stops updating! the workaround in that case is to:
click on the FK hand bone, make an IPO window visible, then click on the “show” button in the copy rot constraint for the hand, then make sure the IPO window is set to show constraint IPOs. Now retype the name of the driver in the N key panel (it’s IK_FK.R/L depending on which side). Now it should start updating again. I found the system to be slightly more robust if you don’t need to switch between FK and IK in the same animation.
30-10-2007 at 4:51 pm
Bassam,
Loved your tutorial in NYC.
When I go into edit mode on Mancandy, he dissapears. Well, his waist and legs remain. Why is this? Looks like you’re doing something fancy there, but I can’t figure out how to coax him back.
You mentioned something about using lattices on his face in conjunction with the bones. I wanted to figure that out, but it’s all gone. Also, also, what are you using the close the eyes? I figured out that I was supposed to shrink the square, but other than that I can’t figure out how it works.
Thanks!
30-10-2007 at 8:10 pm
Hi eric! yes, just hit “alt-H” while in edit mode, I bet I just hid the vertices while editing.
scaling the squares down closes (and scaling them up opens wide) the eyes. Moving the squares up and down moves the “center line” of the eyelids. Nice for distinguishing between eyes sleeping or eyes squeezed shut expressions.
30-10-2007 at 9:06 pm
Thanks, I’ll check that out.
Second, I checked again and I didn’t see a mention in the comics. Your pose of the three Mancandies is a painting isn’t it? It looks like a Madonna or a Jesus and Disciples pose. What is it? I’m so curious!
Thanks for helping out the community so much. I’ll be buying that DVD when it finally comes out!
1-11-2007 at 1:06 pm
When I said “comics” above, I meant “comments”
2-11-2007 at 4:09 pm
Thank Bassam..
May I ask where I can find a high res video of the latest ‘Mancandy Rigging Preview’ you showed lately? What I found are all captured by cameras..
Thank you again..
3-11-2007 at 2:00 pm
ah, comments! I was a bit confused about “comics”. I’m not sure where the pose came from; I’ve certainly seen enough old paintings to be influenced by them. Somebody pointed out to me recently a possible influence by a certain memorial/tomb in an Argentine graveyard that I was quite taken with at the time. In it, there is also a standing figure benficiently “residing” over some admiring recumbent characters.. but I guess all influences were subconcious.
RedBirdiii: Well, blender foundation will be selling the DVD, so it’s up to them to release content- it will be creative commons so I guess it will “get out there” once distributed. In the meantime, a little birdie tells me there will be a posting somewhere on the blender website “very soon” with interesting preview material (for much more than just the mancandy DVD)
4-11-2007 at 7:30 pm
[...] http://freefactory.org/posts/candy-for-everyone - the mancandy character animation rig Leave a Comment [...]
6-12-2007 at 6:35 pm
First off: Wonderful rig, by far the best one I’ve used, and really fun to animate.
But I’m having a problem. With the most recent 2.0 download the IK controller on his right-side doesn’t work. The one of the left works perfect.
Any help would be appreciated.
7-12-2007 at 12:15 pm
Hi Hobo Joe, it seems to work here; check to see that you have the action “MCdriven” active (or a copy of it) and that the IK slider for the right arm is on IK (not FK).. if it still doesn’t work, click on the forearm bone and hit “show” in it’s constraint panel— that sometimes has jogged things when blender got stuck here…
in general, this way of IK/FK switching is not very clean.. lucky that the current SVN has animation features that allow perfect FK IK and pivot blending… once 2.5 is out, mancandy’s IK / FK should become foolproof.
oh, if it still doesn’t work, upload your file and I’ll take a look at it.
cheers
Bassam
11-12-2007 at 10:20 am
Hello, I’m studying ManCandy for hours now and I still don’t understand how one bone is controlling 3 vertex groups (fingers). It seems to be basic stuff but I can’t find any tutorial about it. Anyone has info or link ?
Thanx
11-12-2007 at 1:50 pm
Hi Chris- it’s not *that* basic- there’s even a detail tutorial about it on the DVD- but basically, the bone doesn’t control the vertex groups directly; instead it is the parent for a couple of IK targets on armature layer 16, that in turn work on a chain of 3 bones on layer 14. when you scale the bone, the IK targets move “in” towards the hand, thus forcing the finger to curl up- when you rotate it, the finger just follows the target.
Hope that helped
12-12-2007 at 5:22 am
First of all thank you Bassam for this perfect rig. I am also looking forward your first DVD :-)
For some time I am trying to implement “switch” for Mancandy stretching. It would be very usefull to have one simple switch to enable/disable stretching of the character (much like your switch for FK/IK). Or at least to have one switch to reset stretched character i.e. all stretched bones to non-stretched position. I was inspired by this rig - http://www.luvictu.com/reel/victor_vinyals_demo_low.mpg
But I really have no luck. I was trying to use IPO drivers or new transform constraint :-( But is is really much more difficult challenge than I expected. So I was wondering whether you was thinking of this useful functionality or even have some ideas (or confirm that probably it is not actually possible in Blender).
12-12-2007 at 2:49 pm
JiriH, it’s possible, but not easy- you just have to have a stretching and non stretching IK chain, and switch between them- You could even do a “snap to unstretched” thing if you wanted, by having an unstretched IK chain with a child at the tip, and then snapping the IK target to the location of that child if you wanted to have the chain unstretched at that keyframe- I personally don’t find either of those two things terribly useful; If the animator can’t tell if the character is off model, chances are noone will.
a thing I saw in some disney rigs is a colored stripe that changes based on stretch, as an indicator to animators. this is possible, but blender doesn’t update materials in the viewports until you render, which makes is less than useful.
last: try doing your work in blender SVN: you can do IK/FK switching that *really* works there, without jumps, and without glitches/bugs, and without the need for actions/ NLA strips. Plus you can script it nicely with python, and provide good control- it would be much more rewarding to do stretch/ non stretch switching there, than trying to kludge something in 2.45
2-01-2008 at 5:10 pm
Thanks for Mancandy, man! Very cool to learn some stuff. :)
25-02-2008 at 12:30 pm
[...] I found particularly good the idea of making a special video covering the 'basics' of what the viewer will face. Bassam took a basic low poly mesh and applied some modifiers, explaining what they do and why they should appear in a particular order in the modifier stack. These basic principles are heavily applied on ManCandy, and should be considered when you have to create your next rig. [...]
1-03-2008 at 10:46 pm
Thanks a lots Bassam
6-03-2008 at 10:31 am
Thanks for the great rig, I really enjoy animating with it!
Are you going to be releasing an updated version for Blender 2.46?
6-03-2008 at 7:00 pm
yeah, it might be- I have to check and see if mancandy 2.1 works with 2.46 prereleases, if not, there is either a bug/regression in blender, or it is an accepted backwards incompatibility, and I have to change the rig.
Either way, might be nice to see if I can slip a small improvement in and have a nice official 2.2 rig to go with blender 2.46.
On another note, we have to start organizing the website so that there are permanent pages (for instance for mancandy) so it is easier to download than digging through looking for a blog post.
stay tuned! :)
6-03-2008 at 8:54 pm
The changes list for 2.46 says this:
Space Conversions mean that there can be more control over what values are used to drive the owner. However, they also highlighted the buggy nature of ‘Local’ option that has now been removed. As a result, rigs which depended on the buggy ‘Local’ option (i.e. the jaw of the ‘Mancandy’ character by Bassam Kurdali) broke.
6-03-2008 at 8:55 pm
The changes list for 2.46 says this:
Space Conversions mean that there can be more control over what values are used to drive the owner. However, they also highlighted the buggy nature of ‘Local’ option that has now been removed. As a result, rigs which depended on the buggy ‘Local’ option (i.e. the jaw of the ‘Mancandy’ character by Bassam Kurdali) broke.
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-245/constraint-improvements/
16-03-2008 at 9:06 pm
I’ve got two problems:
1) I bought the Mancandy FAQ DVD and got the Mancandy 2.0 and 2.1 files off of it. When I open THOSE files, I am unable to see any bones or go to any pose mode. However, when I download the very same version from your site, I am able to move bones. Do you know what might be the difference between the two sources of the two files?
2) I followed your advice on the DVD of File->AppendorLink and then loading up the Mancandy Group. (This time using even the file directly from your website). Then when I add a “group” of Mancandy, I once again end up with something that is unposable.
18-03-2008 at 10:45 pm
Hi Greg. the reason for 1 and 2 is similar.
Basically, there are two ways to use mancandy. One is to use / copy the mancandy file itself and animate in it. The other way is to link the mesh (like the DVD shows). As you watch the DVD, in the second case you must create a proxy to animate (first add the group add->group-….>mancandy) then hit ctrl-alt-p to add a proxy for candyskel (follow the setup tutorial on the DVD for better help)
Because of the proxy, having the armature visible results in having two visible armatures in the linked file, one poseable, one not. This is a mess. So: I hide the armature in the library file.
so, if you use the first method, you have to unhide the armature. Open Mancandy 2.0 or 2.1 blend file, open an outliner view shift -F9, then look for candyskel, and make sure the eye and selection icon are both on, then you can animate mancandy right in his original file.
19-03-2008 at 8:41 pm
Thank you for making the rig and the dvd available. I realize it encapsulates years of experience. For me, I thought this would mean a few months of study, but now it seems it may take much longer after I realized the complexity of the rig.
Do you plan to publish some more basic guide to rigging? I understand that there may be more than 1 way to make a rig, and that you may not want to impose your method as ‘the’way to make a ‘professional’rig. I also bought Tony Mullen’s book, and you probably think that I must be ‘thick’ not to get things that may seem obvious to you, but the learning curve is really steep.
What suggestions do you have for somebody to progress up to a ‘pro’ level of rigging/animating competence (such as creating something of the level of mancandy)?
Simple question to end (to better illustrate my level of incompetence): how do you get the shape of the inverted pyramid and cone that animate the torso? Are these lattices? I tried to select these and go into edit mode but I get the ’stick’bone instead. How do you achieve that?
Thank you again.
21-03-2008 at 5:53 pm
tikomiko: Rigging is a daunting task- it combines “artistic” with “technical” ability very heavily, and it doesn’t really work by itself- you need at least models to rig, and some animation needs to test it and find what you need.
For the basics, I recommend the following sources:
* the blender wiki docs
* the blender essentials book
* the tony mullen character animation book rigging chapters.
It also helps a lot to look at rigging manuals and tutorials for other software- the fact that you have to “translate” the knowledge to blender is and advantage, as it forces you to think and create more than just following blindly.
If you don’t want to learn how to rig (just animate) the best thing to do is start with prerigged characters such as mancandy, ludwig, etc. and jump into it. You can also do simple rigs targetted at specific animation tasks.
I do have a plan for future rigging help; perhaps I will make more tutorials, but at this point I am more interested in developing a rig-setup wizard type of python script, that will help both new users, and for automating tasks for speed in a production environment. Sadly this is not much more than “a plan” in mind right now.
25-04-2008 at 11:21 am
[...] Pretty nice and sums up my mood at the moment. Generally dark and puzzled. Not over someone called Suzanne though :). Not that I should make a habit of expressing my mood though mancandy. [...]
7-05-2008 at 5:25 pm
Just wanted to compliment you on your wonderful work. Downloaded Mancandy and hope to study and learn your techniques for rigging. Thank you so much for sharing. By the way, your SIGGRAPH 2007 demo video was terrific. Your work has such lovely humor and I hope you develop large fan bases of customers.
7-05-2008 at 8:22 pm
Thanks! Have fun rigging and animating.
25-05-2008 at 7:58 pm
One of the greatest rigs ever, and the model is awesome! The deformations are so natural…
10-06-2008 at 7:27 pm
[...] ManCandy [...]
3-07-2008 at 5:27 pm
Love the rig, am using it for animation exercises, but the jaw broke in 2.46. Please fix!
4-07-2008 at 5:18 am
Hi Mtracer, that’s already fixed, check the most recent blogpost:
http://freefactory.org/posts/a-taste-of-things-to-come
I’m planning on making a better web structure to support mancandy, but haven’t had the time yet- it’s on my todo list!
15-07-2008 at 2:51 pm
Hey, sorry if you’ve been asked this quite a few times, and I missed it in the previous posts but…the ManCandy rig doesn’t function properly in the new 2.46 version, as I’m sure you know.
Do you have any idea why the eyelids became more translucent, and the jaw only works when you drag it horizontally, instead of vertically?
Hopefully I’ll hear from you soon, and thanks in advance…
The Next Ghosst
16-07-2008 at 8:41 am
Hi The Next Ghosst
yes, there’s a fix in this post: http://freefactory.org/posts/a-taste-of-things-to-come
and coming soon will be a short supplemental video and a 2.4 version of mancandy to come out with blender 2.47
cheers
Bassam
29-07-2008 at 5:41 pm
how do i make the man do anything at all?
29-07-2008 at 6:09 pm
how do i find the pose mode on the new man candy thing erm i think its 2.1 or something
29-07-2008 at 6:16 pm
OH SORRY I MISSED THE POST EVERYONE IGNORE EVERYTHING IVE SAID OK SORRY
29-07-2008 at 6:17 pm
oh sorry people i just noticed that the new version is out sorry i didnt reed the post above all of mine
29-07-2008 at 6:18 pm
so how do i find the pose mode on man cand 2.3? XD
30-07-2008 at 11:31 am
Hi Liam:
either link the file from another (start a new file, save it, append/link, then link, browse to the mancandy2.3 file, select groups then mancandy), then in the 3d view add->group->mancandy, and then ctrl-alt-p to get the proxy armature you can pose OR:
in the mancandy 2.3 file, open the outliner, find candyskel, then unhide it.
you can then pose it directly in the file.