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Snoopy
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    « on: August 13, 2012, 06:17:27 PM »


    here i am again, with another hopefully helpful guide.  this time, using bone edits in conjunction with rigging to achieve better results and cool effects.  this is meant for people who are confident in their rigging skills, and as such, i assume you know the basics of rigging before you start reading this.  i can answer rigging questions, but there's at least 2 or 3 guides for learning the basics of rigging.  if you need ideas or help with bone edits, or clarifications on something as i'm not exactly the best at explaining the first time around, just ask.  i'll eventually make a list of bones that you should be able to use from each character to move around and make the edits with.

    also keep in mind, bone edits should be more of a last resort type thing.  if you can make the model fit the bone structure you want with very minimal edits, then just stick with that.

    and as with other bone edits, i think they'll cause de-sync issues on wifi, although i'm not too sure if it only happens when bones are renamed.  i never play with hacks on wifi, so i'm not sure.


    1 Getting Started
    2 Easy Edits
    3 Tricky Edits
    4 Testing
    5 Examples


    1 Getting Started
    to start off with, here's the terminology you should know for bones, and how they're organized.
       Parent - the bone above the one you are looking at.  example: the YRotN is the parent of the HipN bone, and the XRotN is the parent of the YRotN, and the TransN is the parent of the XRotN.
       Child - the bone(s) below the bone you are looking at.  there can be multiple children bones to one parent bone.  example: the TopN bone has the TransN and EyeYellowM bones as children, but the TransN only has the XRotN as a child.
       Sibling - bones that have the same parent bone, or are all on one level of the structure.  example: the TransN and EyeYellowM bones are siblings.  BB refers to these as Next and Previous.

    the next important thing to know is how to make bones static.  if you rename a bone, it will no longer have any movements applied and it'll stay exactly where it is, only being affected by the parent bone's movements.  it's the same theory for how the one slot resizes work, except we aren't going to mess with the MotionEtc file.  this is useful for many situations, if you need to extend or bring in the arms or legs, or you want to move a bone chain to affect a different part of the model.  i'll give examples shortly. 

    2 Easy Edits
    now the important part, how to move bones around.  it's rather simple, actually.  just find a bone you want to move, right click it, and BB will show you how that bone can be moved.  remember though, it only moves one spot at a time, so it can take a few clicks to get a bone into position.  so here's the options.
       Move Up - moves the bone above the sibling bone in front of it.
       Move Down - moves the bone below the sibling bone behind it.
       Add To Parent - makes the bone a sibling to its current parent bone.
       Add To Next Up - makes the bone a child to the sibling bone above it.
       Add To Next Down - makes the bone a child to the sibling bone below it.
       Add New Child - adds a new bone to the structure, making it the child of the right clicked bone.

    of course, the immediate question you're probably thinking of is 'well, what bones should i move then?'  the basic answer is any bones you know you won't be rigging anything to.  you can use any bones you want, as long as they're renamed.  some characters have a lot of extra bones you can use, while others have very few extra.  for example, Sonic has about 8 - 10 bones used for his quills that you could very easily use, because not many other characters would actually need them.  but other characters, like the Ice Climbers, have almost no extra bones you can use (yeah, they still do have some, but you'd have to use semi important bones, like the Mouth bones). 

    oh, and try to make any bone edits in BrawlBox BEFORE grabbing the bone structure that you would use to rig the model to.  that way, Max doesn't freak out later that the bones are in different positions, which could then make it export incorrectly, which then screws it up when importing it into BrawlBox, which then just creates a mess.  it's happened to me a few times.  with the newest BrawlBox versions, you can load more than 1 model in the previewer, so you can match up the bones even before exporting them to Max.

    as an example, i'm rigging Ridley to Charizard's bones, but Char's legs are very wide apart, and Ridley's aren't.  Char happens to have 2 unused tail bones, DummyHipN and TailJCon.  i moved them up and attached them to the top of the legs, RLegJ and LLegJ.  then in BrawlBox, before exporting the .dae to get the bone structure from, i positioned them so that the legs are much closer together, an X Translation of 3 for the bones. 

    it really just depends on how many bones you need, and which ones you won't be rigging to anything.  you shouldn't use any bones above the HipN, because they're all important, and if you move them, you'll throw the indexes of the important bones off which will cause all sorts of other glitches to happen.  and that actually reminds be, be careful about where you move bones from, you may end up causing issues.  make sure the RHaveN (or just HaveN for Pikachu, Squirtle, and Ivysaur) stays in the same index as it started, otherwise your rig will hold items incorrectly.  this shouldn't happen too often, as the right arm is usually about the last part of the bone structure.  the LHaveN doesn't matter (except for Samus, because that's the one she uses for items), so don't worry about messing it up.  and besides the ThrowN, and the HipN and above, the rest shouldn't matter if the index is changed.

    an example of this would be my Dixie.  i moved Diddy's tail bones to the NeckN, thus letting me rig Dixie's hair to those bones.  the problem was that the tail bones were after everything else.  before i realized it, i had tried her in game, and she was holding items with her arm.  thus, i had to move the RHaveN up a few bones to get it back to the proper index so that she would hold items with her hand again.

    again, this doesn't happen too often, but do watch out for it.

    3 Tricky Edits
    now what could i mean by tricky edits?  well, moving bones around to match a model, without renaming the bones (unless you need a few for adjustments from what i explained above).  yes, this goes against what all the basic rigging guides tell you to do, which is to match the model to the bones, but it isn't completely necessary to do so.  it does make it a lot easier that way, which is why it's the suggested way for rigging.  the reason it works is because the bones aren't renamed.  once the animations are applied in Brawl, the bones will revert back to the way they were, taking the skin with it, and acting as though they were never moved.  if done properly, you can get decent results. 

    for example, my Ridley on Charizard again.  besides the bone edits to move the legs closer together, i also moved many of the other bones around to better fit Ridley.  the advantage of this is that i can make the rig better by not having to distort the model to make it fit the bones.  the disadvantage is that some oddities can come up because of it (although i'm pretty certain it's because Char was not made overly well), and the distortion comes in once the animations are applied.  this pic shows what i'm talking about.



    the bones are fit to Ridley's model, but once the animations are applied, they move right back to position.

    4 Testing
    because testing a rig is always important.  and i don't mean just taking one bone and bending around in Max, i mean exporting it into BrawlBox, and applying the animations to it.  this way, you can see if the animations will screw up how the model is supposed to look or not, and if you think it's good enough to continue rigging.  i'd suggest testing right after you apply the skin modifier, but after a few quick edits, like making sure that the TopN and similar bones don't affect the rig, and that the head is fully rigged to the HeadN bone, even if there's mouth bones.  the idea is to get a basic feel for if the bone edits will work before spending hours rigging only to find out that you need to change something and have to re-rig the entire model.  if it doesn't work, make the changes you need and try again.  if you feel like it's fine, then continue rigging as normal.

    5 Examples
    so you can see what kinds of edits can work, here's everything i've made bone edits for all in one spot.  i do this mainly so you can see a few examples of how to take advantage of bone edits, and to help you think of a few ideas for what you can use them for.  you don't have to just use them to only adjust arm and leg positions.  look what i did with Dixie and Klonoa, for example.  had i not used bone edits for those two, the hair for both and Klonoa's ears would have been stiff, just rigged to the HeadN bone, no movement at all.  basically what i'm saying is, get creative.

    and if you need a closer look at any of these, they're all on the Vault so you can download them and see exactly what i changed.  these are more of a quick look type of thing.


    Pacman:  edits - Sonic's quill bones to adjust the arms and legs, and to rig the mouth to open and close (for an eventual PSA that this model was specifically made for).




    Dixie:  edits - Diddy's tail bones have been reconnected to the NeckN, renamed the first tail bone and positioned it, then rigged the rest to Dixie's hair.  because Diddy's tail bones are at the end of the structure, i had to adjust the RHaveN to ensure that Dixie held items with her hand, not her arm.




    Klonoa:  edits - Sonic's quill bones were reconnected so that the upper set have 3 each, but the base quill bones renamed and positioned.  the rest retain their original name, so that the ears and hair have some movement.




    Ridley:  edits - most of the structure has been shifted to fit Ridley's model.  used Charizard's 2 unused tail bones (DummyHipN and TailJCon) and added them to the top of the legs, then moved them in to slim the leg base width.



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    « Reply #1 on: August 18, 2012, 02:41:48 PM »


    MM...how can i make a new bone (add new child) but i want that this bone was affected by the game ( like capes) ? iss possible?
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    Snoopy
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    « Reply #2 on: August 18, 2012, 10:18:13 PM »


    as of right now, can't happen.  you could use the bones that the characters already have for that, like Marth's cape bones or ZSS's hair, but you can't add any to characters that already have them. 
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    « Reply #3 on: August 27, 2012, 11:19:46 PM »


    Im trying to rig a model over Mario's bones but his shoulder J bone is to far out, I would edit the models body to fit with the shoulder but it looks so stupid. Since I dont use the shoulder N bone can I edit that to put shoulder J in the right place? Or is there more to it...
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    « Reply #4 on: August 28, 2012, 12:03:37 AM »


    yeah, his is a bit further out...  but yes, you should just be able to pull them in and have them work just fine.  there might be animation issues if you do rename it to make it keep its position, but since it's the ShoulderN bones, it shouldn't have issues.  but you'd have to check that after you rig it.
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    « Reply #5 on: August 28, 2012, 03:21:48 PM »


    Its me again, and I have a issue. Whenever I import my edited bone model into 3ds max alot of the bones disappear along with the some of the model, but I edit the bones in brawl box before I put it in 3ds max like you said. Also a screen pops up saying that there was a reading writing problem saying that it failed to read array in some poly joints. All I did was go to the shoulderN bones I'm not using renamed them, opened up the model preveiwer, moved the shoulderN bones over enough to fit the model, and exported. Am I missing any steps?
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    « Reply #6 on: August 28, 2012, 08:22:07 PM »


    so you renamed them before exporting from BrawlBox the first time?  that may be the issue, i've had that happen a few times.  try not renaming them first, but still having moved them, then re-export from BB and see if that fixes it.  i thought that might have only be something on my part...
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    « Reply #7 on: August 28, 2012, 11:06:26 PM »


    Alright I think I got it working I'm gonna test it out in game, it looks fine in BBox with the animations but his punches are off.
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