11-10-2008
This version of Mancandy is for use (as the versioning suggests) for the upcoming blender 2.48. from now on, I’m going to keep mancandy versioning aligned with blender versioning to make it easy to answer which version with which.
Changes from 2.0:
- (compatibility) Bones thighbend.L/R, calfbend.L/R, forearmbender.L/R, bicepbender.L/R,Neckbend and any other constraints with local/local space have the offset button checked. This fixes problems with forward cycling introduced with constraint refactor in blender 2.46 (this is really just a workaround, my hope is that offset bone and constraints will play nicer in future blender versions)
- (compatibility) Action constraints, e.g. on eyebase.L,jawfan and jaw, have had their values changed to the “right” target rotation min/max. Previous blender versions required inputing incorrect numbers for correct behavior, when this was fixed (again in 2.46) action constraints on the mouth and eyes broke, resulting in a lopsided expression. This should now work again.
- (new feature) Bone groups introduced: This is rather hackish, done just as an example, but there is now a “left”, “right”, “torso”, “mouth”, “cheeks”, “eyes” and “benders” colored bone groups, to allow a bit better 3D view and action editor organization. This just an example, it’s trivial to add new groups, change the colors, etc. Have fun!
- (new feature) Bone Wire toggle activated on controls: it is no longer neccessary to change the proxy armature draw mode to “Wire” in scene files; the bones will automatically display as wireframes.
- (new feature) Group Layer visiblity: the Mancandy Group Layers are only visible in layer 2; this means that a- linked mancandy only shows the mesh, and b- I could unhide everything in the library file. Now people wishing to use mancandy without linking won’t have a “where did the armature go” moment, and people wishing to link will still only see the mesh (and the proxy armature when they add it)
- (fix) Made everything selectable again in the library file: making empties/curves/etc unselectable proved to be more trouble than it was worth, causing many trips to the outliner.
- (new feature) IK constraint improvements: deleted kneerotIK.L/R, armrot.L/R and the rotational IK constraints on thigh and upper-arm bones, instead using pole vector on the arm and leg IKs, with new bones as targets: elbowIK.L/R, kneeIK.L/R . This is better behaved, and allows more posing flexibility. Note this causes a slight need to tweak old actions, as the knee and elbow positions might need fixing.
- (new feature) IK/FK switching improvments: removed MCdriven etc actions from the library file (it is no longer needed) and the objects IK_FK.L/R IK_FKbase.L/R. IK/FK switching now uses the bones IKFK.L/R which are parented to bone IKFK_parent (so you can place the controls where you want them). In brief, the controls drive copy rotation constraints (not IK constraints) on toparm.R/L, lowarm.R/L and hand.R/L to a new chain in Armature layer 12 toparmIK.R/L, lowarmIK.R/L, and handIK.R/L. you no longer need to fiddle with special actions to do IK/FK switching, and all your animation will be contained in the same action.
- (fix) Protected all bone layers, not just the visible ones.
- (didn’t fix) slight misalignment of foot.L/R and of the roll of knee_stretch.R; you can fix it in your own downloaded versions, but changing this would break too severely many walks.
- (cleanup) Unused actions (and their IPOblocks) such as MCdriven, MCdriven.001, Action.001, etc have been removed from the file.
Mancandy 2.48 should be the last version to go with the blender 2.4 series. Next version of mancandy will be for versions 2.50, and incompatible with older rigs (I can finally fix those misalignment problems) but hopefully, much much better.
Please test! other than the noted differences (the elbow and knee rotation controls, and the IK/FK switching, this version should work fine on old actions), and for sure should have no problems in new files, so long as you are using blender 2.48 (any of the rc versions will work for now)
Oh yeah, a download (mancandy 2.48! ) link.
Edit: since blender 2.48 got released, and I didn’t find any bugs (at least no new ones), I’ve decided that this is mancandy_2.48 official; as a result, I’ve renamed the download link,but if you already got 2.48_rc1 you don’t need to download; it’s the same file.
11-10-2008 at 3:50 pm
woot! more mancandy to play with!
you rawk, sir!
.andy
11-10-2008 at 6:35 pm
Bassam!… thanks for Updated Mancandy´s and Rigs!!
Is it possible to Update also Proog and Emo also for 2.48 or upcomming 2.50?
Thanks!
11-10-2008 at 7:33 pm
Andy: thanks: as always you (and venom) are the grossos.
Billy: Possible yes! while I’m not planning on doing this myself, this is not to say that some kind soul won’t. Might be cool to have a central repo for assets esp. rigged characters, on some versioning system; that way the responsibility to update could get more easily spread about among multiple people.
It is also my sincere desire that at some point in the not-too-distant-future, blender constraint system is stabilized enough that we don’t need to continuously tweak old rigs.
If I have some down time I’ll take a look at old Emo and Proog, just won’t promise anything at the moment
12-10-2008 at 1:14 am
Bassam, Very cool I’ll post it on BN. Hope all is well with you.
Tim
12-10-2008 at 1:20 am
Thanks Tim! I’m doing well here, I hope the same for you …
12-10-2008 at 4:33 pm
Great news. Nice to see that number of rigging issues in Blender are being much more simple with new releases.
Thank you very much Bassam.
12-10-2008 at 8:14 pm
Bassam, how did you get Mancandy’s new IK/FK switching to work, Please help me I’ve been trying to figure this out for so long please tell me what you did. Thank you. If it isn’t too much trouble I would prefer as much detail you could possibly give.
12-10-2008 at 9:20 pm
NP JiriH, good luck with your rigging
Erick:
here are the basic steps (for any animated constraint, doesn’t have to be IK/FK)
1-make sure there is an IPO window open, showing constraint IPO blocks.
2-make sure you have prepared a bone to act as a switching control (you will use it to drive) for instance, a small bone that moves from 0 to 1 (in it’s local coords) on the x axis.Let’s call this one “control”
3-select the bone that has a constraint you want to switch on and off.
4-In the buttons window, click the “show” button on the constraint you want to animate.
5-In the IPO editor, you will see a new block usually without a curve. there is a small icon that looks like an action editor icon; for bone constraints this is at first on. *turn it off* this is very important, as we want the switch to be part of the rig, not part of the action.
6-now add a driver in the IPO window (N key panel) add driver, then in the put the name of the armature (e.g. Armature) in the driver object, select pose, type the name of your control bone “control” , select e.g. x axis. then in the IPO editor, hit I, select default one to one mapping. Edit the curve as needed.
7-I usually have the constraint going from -0.001 to 1.001 instead of 0 to 1 on the y axis in the IPO editor; this is because I’ve been hit with float precision errors in the past. The bug may have been fixed, but better safe than sorry, eh?
If someday I become less lazy, I’ll do a small suplementary video tute.
cheers
Bassam
13-10-2008 at 2:11 am
Bassam, I now declare you Blender Lord. Thank you so much!
13-10-2008 at 8:05 am
Thank you so much Bassam! The Mancandy Blend files have helped me with rigging more than any other tutorial has.
13-10-2008 at 9:53 am
Eric, concerning new switch you may follow also this thread:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=135402
13-10-2008 at 9:54 am
Bassam, I intend to buy the dvd training.
Will you update it (dvd) or only mancandy character?
13-10-2008 at 11:29 am
Lucio: There are no plans to update the DVD itself at the moment; probably I will release an official “errata” document, that lists the (currently only one) thing in the tutorials that doesn’t work in 2.48. There is also the possibility of making some supplemental video tutes, that cover newer features.
BTW this is the errata: In the tutorial, whenever you make local constraints, you should do Local/Local in newer blender, AND you should turn on the offset button (this is to keep the constraint working around forward cycling).
That’s it; basically, everything else works.
13-10-2008 at 11:51 pm
Hey, that’s very cool! =)
Thanks a lot for the updates, Bassam. I’m using Mancandy a lot these days.
Cheers
14-10-2008 at 2:43 am
That’s nice, I’m going to dig through this one.
cheerio man.
14-10-2008 at 5:09 am
Very happy with this
I Don`t do rig that much but with this Update I have to
go more deep on rigs.
Thanks Bassam.
14-10-2008 at 7:54 am
Hey I just bought the DVD online and I’m waiting for it to arrive in the mail, so while this announcement freaked me out a bit (looking at all the things that are fixed, I assumed that they’d be broke if I tried to follow along using 2.47 or 2.48), so answer 13 is well handy
Would you recommend I use say 2.45 to work through the dvd?
14-10-2008 at 11:16 am
hi bakedbeing: the dead simplest thing to do for following the DVD is to use blender 2.45; if you want to use later versions, follow along, but use mancandy 2.48 instead of the one on the DVD; for the riggng excersized, everything is the same, just remember the old “local” option for constraints is now local/local, and that if you use it, also press the “offset” button so that your rig is (a bit) forward cycling proof. This is a workaround- hopefully you won’t have to do that in future versions of blender.
The benefit of using blender 2.45 is that everything will work exactly like the tutorials; but if you use 2.48, you will become more familiar with new options and interface for your future work (just use mancandy 2.48)
One last thing: the IK/FK switching tutorial in the DVD teaches you the basic idea of doing animated constraints (set up a constraint, and then drive it’s IPO influence curve with a control of some sort) but it’s better to do it as I mentioned in comment #8 (turn off the action in the IPO, and use a bone in the same armature as the driver/controller). This will only work in recent versions of blender (not 2.45)
I do however, recommend you use blender 2.48 for your general work; there are many new features, old features working better, bugfixes, etc.
14-10-2008 at 8:01 pm
[...] Well, it’s about time for an update. Ken’s been experimenting a lot with interactivity for his (game)project. Awesome psychedelicy stuff! I’ve been playing with exploding particles and with animating Mancandy. [...]
14-10-2008 at 9:45 pm
Passing just to say thanks.
Great work!
14-10-2008 at 10:55 pm
hey, thanks filipe; I’ve looked at paper orange blog from time to time, really inspirational work
16-10-2008 at 12:32 pm
Bassam,
My nick name is Tio Ilmo and I am Brazilian.
I started working with Blender in 2005, but during this period I could not spend enough time to learn how to work with rigging process. In order to memorize the enormous Blender interface I created 30 Blender video tutorials and hosted them at Youtube. They help many people learn the basic of Blender too.
I know that many things are new in Blender since the old 2.37 version,
but unfortunately I had to stop improving my 3D skills for many reasons which are not important now.
Now I am interested in returning back to Blender mainly at rigging process. Do you think I can learn faster with this 2.48 version? Is it easier than the old ones?
I know all the basic interface of Blender, but everytime I started rigging I’ve regreted. I heard that this new version is more intuitive. Is it true? I know also that Macabdy is one of the easy way to understand the process.
I hope this time I finally will make my chacarcter move. By the way rigging is one thing, make it move, walk are very different, isn’t it?
Best regards!
Tio Ilmo
18-10-2008 at 3:28 pm
Once you have done the DVD stuff get the book called “Animator’s Survival Kit”. I have 3 other books that I bought at the same time and they are ether poor repeats or worthless. This book will give you all you need to know to become a great animator. The only other tips I would have would be to do one animated walk a day (render it wire frame or some setting that takes very little time.), watch real people walk, watch old cartoons, study how a whip works in detail because all human movement works this way with the hips and shoulders being the handles, take normal human acting classes like you might to lean to do a play and maybe study dance (have not done this but have studied Judo and Karate).
20-10-2008 at 7:56 am
Don’t quite know how I did it but 23 is by me and not Tio LLmo
20-10-2008 at 10:11 am
Really great rig - however I was just wondering will Mancandy ever have face and body morph targets. Although Mancandy is probably the best rig for Blender I’m not keen on the way he looks (and I think there’s a lot of prejudice in the animation world against this rig from my experience). He looks malnourished and his head is an odd shape. I’d like him to be more like something in between the rig Alfred and Basic Guy.
Having the ability to change Mancandy’s appearance would be good for Blender I think – keep up the great work and many thanks.
20-10-2008 at 8:51 pm
Hey, thanks for making such an incredible rig!! I was having a problem though, the undo is malfunctioning! It works fine for other objects, but when I try it on Mancandy it undoes all of the changes at once. Sorry for the bother but I was wondering if someone could tell me what I was doing wrong.
22-10-2008 at 12:41 am
Hi, what a nice rig.
Btw, how to interact Mancandy with other object?
Such us a box for him to lift? Do I need to use Loc Rot constraint or need to add a bone to candyskel than parent it to the box?
Could u mind giving me an advice?
Thanks
22-10-2008 at 9:37 pm
Thanks, Bassam, for taking the time to update Mancandy. My cousin and I have a lot of fun stretching, bending, and putting the poor guy in all kinds of situations. And as for what bov says, I think Mancandy looks just fine the way he is.
23-10-2008 at 6:58 am
Hey, Alex:
This is a problem with recent blender versions: until you key everything, undo forces it back to it’s original positions.
so… best practice when you start posing is to probably select all the controls, key it all in Loc/rot/scale, then turn autokey on, and start posing; that way, if you undo, you will only undo the last thing.
23-10-2008 at 7:00 am
Dadagogo: there are two ways:
One is to “attach” the object to the hand, probably via a childoff constraint that you can animate the influence of
Other is to “attach” the hands to the object, then animate the object. Best way is also a child of constraint (again) and of course, in both cases you have to set the offset, and animate the constraint influence.
constraint influence animation: should be zero when the hands are not picking up the cube, 1 when the hands are picking up the cube.
nice thing is, if you are linking mancandy, blender allows you to add extra constraints to the bones, and animate those.
17-11-2008 at 7:49 am
Thanks dude!
Congrats!
22-11-2008 at 11:38 am
i want to make a animation with it it’s soooooooo nice
-amsterdam
p.s.
i put it on youtube.
5-01-2009 at 8:39 pm
Very good! Very good. If you want to see a little animation I did. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VSJiLsMKhE