12-02-2007
With the imminent release of blender ( 2.43 ) I’ve decided to publish the latest version of everyone’s favourite blender test dummycharacter. This Mancandy includes stretchy, bendable limbs inspired by Disney’s Meet The Robinsons characters, and an extra set of lattice-y controls for the face, inspired by the facial rigs in the Plumiferos movie.
The leg setup took me many evenings of experimentation to get right. I showed it at the Blender conference, so I hope it’s become familiar to blender riggers and animators by now- basically, you can stretch the legs, and modify the knee position on any pose, and you can rubber-hose the legs by pulling on the controllers in the middle of the leg. Similar setups are on the arms and neck.
There’s some IKFK blend controls for the arms- these are seperate objects driving constraint channels; for the drivers to work you can:
a- animate in action mode, starting from a copy of the “driven” action.
b- animate in NLA mode, with a driven action strip with hold on in the NLA.
There are some known problems with the rig: I removed some shapes in the hip/groin/butt area because I had to tweak the base geometry, so hip deformations are rougher looking. The new stretchy stuff is in many cases tacked on to the original rig- in some cases this results in bad deforms especially in extreme cases. I’ll probably not fix these till the next version of mancandy, which will have a more or less rebuilt rig. The current rig is/should be backwards compatible with your old animations, so have fun.
This release is more or less an alpha- please test, pose and animate, and report any flipping limbs, bad deformations, and other problems here. I’d like to release a “final” version more or less with every blender release.
One last note: this version of Mancandy is designed for the 2.43 release of blender- it may break horribly on older versions. You can either wait for the official release, or better yet, download a release candidate from blender.org and start playing now.
[EDIT:]
- fixed the armature scale bug found by Mike-
new version mancandy_2.0pre2 - renamed arm bones for backwards compatibility with version 1; turned off subsurf in OpenGL view for speed -
new version mancandy_2.0pre3 - fixed leg-lattice parenting for forward cycling; changed track of armature-object to -y for curve deform. New version
mancandy_2.0pre4 - massive cleanup, removed 10 bones, hid control objects, removed extra data, fixed some bugs. Sane rendersettings in file. New version
mancandy_2.0pre5 - a “tab-tab” fix- file had a tonne of cyclic dependancies, which were “healed” by a tab-tab. I have no idea why, too late at night to figure out, here is the update mancandy_2.0pre6
12-02-2007 at 1:10 pm
cool man, very good rig!
12-02-2007 at 8:17 pm
“With the imminent release of blender”
.. 2.43 that is :)
Mike
12-02-2007 at 8:37 pm
whoops! fixed. Now go debug the rig, not the blogpost! :)
14-02-2007 at 3:20 am
Very nice rig!! Very easy to use and great control. Might save yourself a lot of posts if you set up camera & lighting. As you have it you get nice black renders. [sure to get noobs posting]
Thats the only suggestion from me, couldn’t get anything to break.
FK - IK Sliders on the arms are sublime. You spoil us all Bassam!
17-02-2007 at 3:49 am
That’s an amazing rig! Would it be possible, (sensible) to add limit rotation constraints to the rig? This might make working with the rig even easier.
17-02-2007 at 4:47 am
If I try to resize the rig, either by resizing it in Object mode or by by resizing the “Body” bone in POSE mode, the arms go all “kaflooey”
Some brief docs on which bones / bone layers are supposed to be animated would be good. Most of those bones I assume are the “custom shaped” ones.
“On screen” controls or some other method of turning on/off IK constraints .. and the stretch constraints would be great too.
Mike
17-02-2007 at 8:14 am
Hey SlikoDigito, I see you did apply the fk/ik controllers in the end :) ! though they’re easily left behind when you start animating. I have the feeling that hip pivot should be lower… but maybe that’s just me.
Naish Taishty ManCandy ish Good with Bread !
17-02-2007 at 1:44 pm
BeBraw: I’ve tried rotation limits in the past, and decided they’re more trouble than they’re worth for a few reasons:
- It’s best to let the animator decide what the limit is- there are many legitemate reasons for breaking joints, especially in such a toony rig. Most animations will keep the character on model, and sanely posed for the most part, but some extreme poses benefit from that extra freedom.
- Rotation locks don’t always do what you want; euler limits on bone rotations can just lock up your character from going from one perfectly legal position to another, forcing the bone to go through rest. sane animators just remove the locks.
- Rotation limit constraints are a bit tricky, since the “real” rotation and the “constrained” rotation become different, leading to very odd looking timing.
17-02-2007 at 1:47 pm
Mike, great- I never thought to scale the rig! I’ll fix that problem.
As for more constraint controls, we’ll see- I’d rather wait for that till we have a better way of blending- there are many limitations to the current driver based way of doing it. (you have to have the drivers in an action, and that action has to be “active” either in the nla or in the action editor, depending on the mode you are in (action/nla).
17-02-2007 at 1:49 pm
malefico, thanks for making the time to give this a once over! yup, I felt that for most people , the benefits of an obvious way to switch IK/FK on the arms outweigh the clumsyness (out-peso?)
17-02-2007 at 4:02 pm
Mike, fixed your scaling bug, check end of post for new download link. thanks!
17-02-2007 at 4:56 pm
you actually inspired me to finish up my own “malefico” character and write some stuff… coming soon ! (soon meaning, after plumiferos premiere :) )
17-02-2007 at 5:04 pm
Bassam,
Thanks for the quick fix, I’m downloading and looking at it now.
How did you fix it? ….(Trying to learn a bit about rigging)
Mike
17-02-2007 at 5:25 pm
Duh, I never noticed that you had FK/IK controls in the viewport ;)
Mike
17-02-2007 at 5:28 pm
malefico, awesome, I look forward to seeing him :).
Mike, It was simple- if you check in the outliner, you’ll see some hidden helper objects- MCbicepCurve.L/R, MCbiceplat.L/R etc. some of them where unparented, whereas they should be parented to the “donttouch” bone in the armature. If everything is parented to the armature (either object or bone), scaling the armature object is safe. Somehow, I had missed this step.
17-02-2007 at 5:30 pm
I’d suggest having the SubSurf turned off for the viewport, with maybe a note explaining that .. On my meagre 1.2g / 756meg machine Subsurf is a big killer on performance, .. having it turned off makes the rig interaction MUCH “snappier” … Hmm I wonder where I learned that tip ? :)
Mike
17-02-2007 at 5:41 pm
I noticed that the “bodycircle”.. bodyplane .. and other objects are not in the “ManCandy” group, but when I appended that group into a scene those objects DID get appended! ….. How does that work ?
Mike
17-02-2007 at 11:06 pm
blender is smart enough to include these automatically; this is important for usage as linked groups with proxies, as you don’t want to see those objects as part of the instanced group.
17-02-2007 at 11:13 pm
BTW, I plan on making some docs- hopefully video tutorial style- after I release him- it’s gonna take me some time to do though!
18-02-2007 at 11:48 pm
Yes..tanks alot
I looking forward to your video tutorial
19-02-2007 at 12:10 pm
Hi,
How can i get that thing? When i push your link i only gets text, and i don’t know how to get that into Blender?
Any other way that i can download it? As a Blend fil ?
But it looks quiet good :D and the facial thing looks really really good ;)
Rasmus
19-02-2007 at 1:09 pm
Rasmus, for some reason your browser is trying to open the .blend.. just right click and “save as” and it should save the .blend to your hd.
19-02-2007 at 5:10 pm
Ok, some updates- forward cycling should work now. I’m not sure I like how curve deform is behaving with the bendy stuff, but I’ll try a fix if I (or you ) can put a finger on what the problem is.
20-02-2007 at 10:49 am
Wouw, now i got it :D hehe,
But really man, that is the best rig i have aver seen! Waauw, i wanna know how you did hehe:D everything.
And i would love to know those techniques you uses, it’s so smart and simple to work with (it propably wasen’t easy to build that rig ;) hehe
But really dude, waouw
22-02-2007 at 8:34 pm
Sooo… I like this rig. I like the bone layers so I can ignore all the squash-stretch stuff. I like that the controls can all the ALT-GKEY’ed to reset their locations to default.
I think you should consider making the smile/frown controller not have as much of a “dead zone” between the expressions. Ramp them into each other a little bit.
I also can’t get the guy to show up when I render. I made lights, a camera, etc… He shows up in the preview panel as black, but in the composite render (F12) it’s just the background and nothing else — not even black. I checked my layers. I checked the nodes. I’m using the brand new BF 2.43… What’s up?
22-02-2007 at 10:40 pm
Bmud; the render thing is probably a side-effect of my not fully deleted none setup- make sure the 3d view and camera is locked to scene, turn composite off.. or just hang on a bit and I’ll upload another rev ;)
I’m trying to get correction shapes back in for the hips, butt and body. The last two are ok, but all my attempts at the hips have interacted *horribly* with the stretchy stuff. I’ll upload a new version tomorrow or the day after- when I’ve solved the hips or given up on them.
Oh and as for the smile frown shapes- they are on a linear driver relative to the controller on layer 9. There are however, more face controllers on layer 10- the new system “kinda” supercedes the old, except you can still use the old controllers to add oomph (or vice versa). The advantage of the layer 10 controls is that they push lattices, and you get more broad motion of the “skin” on the face.
26-02-2007 at 9:40 pm
Hey folks, did some fixes, this might be the last version before release. I did so much you should test a lot- I had oppurtunity to break a lot of stuff.
For the riggers out there: all the deform bones have “deform”, none of the others do. the deform bones are on the 3rd layer from the right, in case you want to weightpaint a new mesh.
Cheers
28-02-2007 at 4:16 am
All I could say is thank you for this nice rig..I will definitely gonna try to learn from this..
2-03-2007 at 1:32 am
Great Rig! I’ve been picking it apart and was very interested in your methods for bone controlled lattice deformations. The process looks very complex(hooks/empties/lattices/curves). Would you mind elaborating on this or guiding me in the right direction for this?
2-03-2007 at 1:45 am
Mr R, been thinking of making some tutorials, or maybe even a rigging DVD. I always start to answer these questions (I just did this) and find myself typing.. and typing.. it’s way too long for a comment on a blog post- yet surprisingly simple stuff once you get the hang of it. in the curve-y cases, the lattices are there to limit the effect, the hooks are there to control the curves, and the armature moves the hooks around (getting the animation back to the armature). Luckily blender 2.43 lets you hide all that, or the viewport would be a mess!
13-03-2007 at 6:45 pm
Hello Bassam,
thank you very much for sharing candyman with us and I hope you’ll find time to make rigging DVD, this would be something Blender community really need!
I did some tests with mancandy on my Blender blog, hope I’ll be able do some animation as well, if I found something strange with it, I’ll let you know…
Keep up the good work, I really apreciate!
-PiPi
19-03-2007 at 11:20 pm
Hello,
Maybe I am just a grumpy critic, but I must confess that in a commercial production the anatomics should look much better, it looks maybe funny to others but not confincing, but for the head I must say that it could not be much better. But after all I think that anatomics are the most difficult part, so why not use Makehuman and try to make a rig for it instead.
Regards,
Bart
5-05-2007 at 11:23 am
Hi Bassam,
I started a little 20sec animation using a clip from Back To The Future II :
http://tinyurl.com/26cpb4
This is the first lip-sync I’ve tried with M.C. I can’t seem to get an “OH or OOOH” (pucker) shape with the mouth.
As for the realism of the anatomy, I just wish he had five fingers on each hand, the rest is fine.
Mike
16-05-2007 at 3:46 pm
Hi Bart- that would be true if I was going for something remotely real; but he’s more in line with a cartoon character than a person.
Mike good work :)
you can get an OH shape better by either :
moving in the two controllers on the edge of the mouth on bone layer 10
or
scaling down the single mouth controller on layer 9
or
a lot of 1 and a little of 9 for extra.
you can of course use other controls to tweak the look
hehe, sorry about the 4 finger hands! it’s just easier to rig and animate for us lazy folk ;)
your animation is a good start! for further work, try using less poses and concentrate more on how he moves from one to another- keep in mind principles of animation, and if you need use reference.
7-06-2007 at 6:43 pm
Bassam,
Thanks for the tips, I hadn’t used those bones for animating yet, relegating them to the “hidden helper” category, but that makes it much easier.
Mike
9-06-2007 at 11:32 am
Bassam, very good work!
Downloading :)
2-07-2007 at 5:26 pm
Downloaded, tested, Liked. :D And pretty much actually.
I’m specially interested about face animations and a simple tutorial would be in place.
I think that I know how it basicly works but some parts I do not understand. Exapmle the jaw. How did you do it?
I tried Alt+h to see all and i did saw some lattices. This explained some to me but still I do not know how did you did the jaw.
I tried to make some character face in makehuman but when I wanted to add animation to it, I used bones to parts that move a lot. Example to jaw but I really did not got a good result.
I really want to animate a face as realistic as possible. What I had in my mind was real acting in front of an camera and then get the face (and body) animation into 3d mesh. Nothing is more realistic than reality. :) If I just had a good tutorial about face animation.
2-07-2007 at 7:14 pm
Hi Niko40, thanks
the Jaw is using some bones on hidden layers; unhide layers 14 through 16 (armature layers, not scene layers) to see them. They basically use a combination of track to and action constraints, similar to how the eyetracker works.
The lattices are for head squash and stretch and facial controls.
Realistic animation is tough. while it’s true that nothing is more real than reality, the closer you get to “realistic” the *worse* the animation looks (until you get to that holy grail of 100% accuracy, which by the way, hasn’t *really* been attained yet- the closest is Davy Jones, who benefits from an over-the-top performance and a non human anatomy)
4-07-2007 at 7:46 am
Okay. I think I can figure out the rest. Thank you.
What comes to realilty. I trust you, but I really have to try it.
25-07-2007 at 8:59 am
only one question. what status mancandy is? i mean what type of license to use is this. it is possible to use mancandy in commercial animations?
25-07-2007 at 8:26 pm
yoozco: yes it’s possible to use mancandy in commercial animations; I’m sorry I haven’t made this “formal” yet, I should include some kind of license so people can know that- what do you think of using one of the Creative Commons licenses? I’m thinking by attribution one (least restrictions), or using a BSD or MIT style license. This reminds me, I haven’t made a formal release yet! and there are a couple of bugs fixed from the last one posted…
expect something soon :)
26-07-2007 at 6:20 am
thanks Bassam for fast answer, mancandy is incredible, i wonder how u dont loose in that web of bones :)
13-09-2007 at 11:24 am
Thanks for the rig update, I checked out your interview and FAQ video, and I really love the features and how you used them to demonstrate - i love the way you used ManCandy to reach over and move the slider for the FK/IK. Funny, very funny :)
4-03-2008 at 7:29 pm
Bassam, I downloaded ManCandy and bought the DVD and ever since then I’ve been applying the rigging techniques to my character.
Has anyone told you that ManCandy is the best rigged generic character for blender out there? So, thank you for the rig, thank you for the DVD.
20-03-2008 at 3:35 am
How is ManCandy 3 coming? I downloaded the new version of blender and ManCandy’s action drivers have stopped working.
18-05-2008 at 6:45 am
Can you stop Mancandy’s legs from stretching - I would like to lift Mancandy at the hips and have his feet come up as well (like most rigs out there). I figured out how to switch off the arm stretching but I can’t seem to find out how to do this with the legs.
Cheers
19-05-2008 at 9:28 pm
well, the easy way to do that is just select both feet and body, the hard way is just to edit the rig, and turn off the IK “stretch” feature on the IK leg bones, this doesn’t let you switch back and forth in one animation, but lets you turn off stretch.
cartoony=stretchy, realistic=not so stretchy, but having the limbs all the time lets the animator always decide how much to stay on model or not. You could always grab the original mancandy, with non stretchy limbs.