Solium - personal research and development

Tomcat

kuligs2 well since my model have fingers, bones are needed, otherwise how are you gonna make them hold a weapon, or fist when running?

In the minimal rig, one finger is more than enough (with plenty to spare) to understand the situation and work through the process. When transitioning to a full-fledged model in your main work, you can add the missing ones. But I already understand that you like to waste time on unnecessary things.

kuligs2

Tomcat im not wasting time, im learning. Failure is how you learn. If we never failed we would not learn a thing.

I dont know how to rig 1 bone to all fingers so that they can close to a fist, but ill see what i can do..

Ive been thinking of reusing the human armature from blender but not generate meta rig. That meta rig introduced like 100 more bones that are hard to filter. The deform armature was what i would say "minimal" rig.

I will remind yall, that this is not a game im working on, just a research type project to see how to set up things for something with more substance.

xyz

kuligs2 Go with "one finger" and a thumb as @Tomcat suggested. It's enough to depict grabs/fists in this type of third person view.

xyz

kuligs2 Colliders are easy to create with physical bones thing or something but, getting the character3d node to recognize all of them is another thing.

Don't do that. Just make things work with a single capsule. Keep it simple.

MikeCL

kuligs2 You could use 3 finger bones..

thumb,
index finder
the rest.

This way you get a reduced amount of bones, and you still have the index finger if you need the character to be able to point etc. But this also depends on the requirements you have for the character.

If the only thing the character will be doing with the hands are, having fingers open as default, and then be able to make a fist. Then I would recommend what @Tomcat showed. The tweak I would do is to align the finger bones to the index finger, so the bones are more aligned in a straighter line. They would deform better when making a fist, also align the geometry so the fingers aren't as spread out, or you would have a hard time closing the fingers to a fist with only one finger rigged.

MikeCL

kuligs2

kuligs2 im not wasting time, im learning. Failure is how you learn. If we never failed we would not learn a thing.

I can respect this. 💪 Makes sense that you want to do everything.

kuligs2 I dont know how to rig 1 bone to all fingers so that they can close to a fist, but ill see what i can do..

It would be the same way as rigging all fingers. But instead of each finger having its own bones, there's only 1 set of bones for 1 finger that all fingers are skinned to. In order for this to work, the mesh for the fingers should align close to each other and not spread like the images previously shown (Only thing I might add would be the thumb bones.). Something like this:

Note: don't know the owner of the image. From a google search result. But it illustrates what it would look like if only rigging to 1 finger.

Tomcat

kuligs2 im not wasting time, im learning. Failure is how you learn. If we never failed we would not learn a thing.

Learning from the general to the specific. First the basics, then the details. That's academic education. You're fixated on the details. That way, you'll never get to the main point (in this case, creating the game itself). 🧑‍🎓

You had a good game at a fairly advanced stage — what happened to it? I want to play it! 🕹️

xyz

kuligs2 im not wasting time, im learning.

Then do the complete rig on your own. Make a skeleton and paint the weights yourself.

kuligs2

MikeCL hmm, ok gotta try the manual way of weight painting for each bone, i just use automatic and it usually does good if enough bones..

I guess i need to assign for each one finger bone section all the finger finger bone sections 😃 i know its hard to follow but something like this?

MikeCL

kuligs2 Yes, you would need to manually do some weight painting. Maybe having the automatic weights could be a good starting point so you don't need to skin everything from scratch. Just do some weight painting where it's needed.

kuligs2 I guess i need to assign for each one finger bone section all the finger finger bone sections 😃 i know its hard to follow but something like this?

Yes, I'm not 100% sure what you mean. but if you mean that each part of the finger needed to be skinned to each finger bone, then yes.. Another note, you could also "cheat" a little by making the fingers closer to each other in length. Since the length of the fingers might also result in a bit of a strange result, the pivot of a single bone rotation might not align perfectly with all of the fingers.

Do you mean that the yellow marking should be skinned to the red circle? If so, no. I'm guessing that's just the tip bone. So the yellow markings should be skinned directly to the underlying bone. So in your marking, that would be the yellow parts of the geometry skinned to the bone right before the red circle.

But the best way for you to experience what works is just to try it as a first step. See what results you get.

xyz

kuligs2 I guess i need to assign for each one finger bone section all the finger finger bone sections 😃 i know its hard to follow but something like this?

Test-animate the bound skeleton and scrub the animation around when painting weights. That way you'll see how exactly the thing is getting deformed which will inform you how it needs to be painted.

Tomcat

kuligs2 I guess i need to assign for each one finger bone section all the finger finger bone sections 😃 i know its hard to follow but something like this?

Use MakeHuman.

kuligs2

Tomcat im no academics enjoyer, i do things my way.

What game? Never had anything resembling a game posted on here.

xyz thats what i was doing and i realized that it resembles the default blender human skelly - without the IK FK helper bones.

xyz This i was doing and then i ended up with as many bones as the default blender skelly.

Tomcat You keep trying to sell me your make human app for years. 😃... not yet, need to suffer a bit more on my own.

Tomcat

kuligs2 im no academics enjoyer, i do things my way.

The alternative to academicism is amateurism. That is, you can suffer, but you shouldn't whine that nothing works out — everything is natural.

You keep trying to sell me your make human app for years.

??! Why is this my app? All progressive humanity uses it. Well, if you're very rich, you can get DAZ or Reallusion.

... not yet, need to suffer a bit more on my own.

Do you happen to have Russian roots? Here, too, there is a “special” path for everything. And they also love suffering.

kuligs2

So ive been expereimenting with custom rigs, and decided that metahuman blender rig is the optimal way to animate a character. The IK/FK bone helpers are already set up, intuitive to use.

The problem i faced that when you export the character with animations, the animations/skeleton has those IK bones and helper bones, that like doubles or triples the bone count in the "Edit filter" where you can filter bones in AnimationTree

Then i noticed that i can export def bones and limit the amount of bones to minimum.

And now in filter there are only the bones that deform.

Now the next gripe is that you cant multi select bones and have to click through each bone to select/deselect.

Now, im trying to decide what AnimationTree node setup to use.. many ways to do things like using statemachines or blend trees.. not sure what would be least resistive path for some basic but extensible animation.

Kinda leaning on NodeBlendTree. But not figured out how to have Jump sequence - jumpstart > ascend> midair> land. Midair and land could be blended like walk and run, but jumpstart and ascend that needs to play in sequence?.. Multiple one_shots?

Another gripe with animationtree is that you cant copy/duplicate nodes inside the node editor. This is super frustrating..

This guy is going through his journey on how to do things.. need to soak this in

MikeCL

kuligs2 You are not supposed to export the control rig to the game engine. Those are only for animating in blender, you then bake the animation down to a "deformation" rig that is "game engine friendly" without the controllers. (or maybe I'm misreading what you mean here?)

MikeCL Game Rig Tools

Is great for this ☝️

Also when you have the animations baked down to NLA tracks, also set the following setting:
Animations Mode = NLA

kuligs2

MikeCL its not like i was born with this knowledge, these are my findings.

Also about baking, before 4.5 there was the need to bake NLA tracks and such but either blender or godot redid something now i just have Actions in blender as animations, and no difference if i "bake" the animations on export or not.

Maybe you could elaborate about why use NLA instead of Actions?

MikeCL

kuligs2 Didn't mean to sound offensive, just sharing information that might be helpful.

The NLA tracks are basically animation layers. So an animator can have more control over animation layering and have it exported as a one animation when imported into Godot. Exporting from Actions, and each action will always result in separate animations. This makes the NLA editor very powerful.

To give a few examples.

As an animator, your workflow might involve animating a base animation, then creating correction animations layered on top of the base in the NLA editor. When naming the animation tracks the same, Godot will then import these as 1 animation. This way, you can animate non-destructively and still keep your animations organized.

Another example is that if you are animating a longer sequence, you can chop each moment into its own animation track in the NLA editor and then blend them, giving you more control/flexibility in animation "editing" (just like when cutting together video, but here with animations instead) instead of messing around with keyframes manually for a long, messy sequence. Then, by naming the tracks the same, you can export the entire sequence as 1 animation to play in Godot.

Another example would be if you happen to have 2 objects that are meant to be animated as 1. If you create animations and simply export the Actions, they will end up being 2 separate animations instead of the 1 intended.

kuligs2

MikeCL Why would you assume i was offended?

This clears up for me the diferences between NLA and actions.

About the 2 separate animations for 2 objects, i have expereinced this before, but now blender have something that is called "Slots"? Havent played with them but this sort of took care of that problem.

Any comment is welcome and dont need to feel like youre walking on eggshells, trying to not offend people for having opinion. I hope this place is not like reddit/discord where opinionated voices gets muted.

Tomcat

MikeCL The NLA tracks are basically animation layers.

Is this not what is changing in the new version of Blender 5?

https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/5.0/animation_rigging/

MikeCL

kuligs2 Why would you assume i was offended?

My bad, " its not like i was born with this knowledge", seemed I might have been given a tone I didn't mean to.

Anyways. Yeah. Blender is making changes in how animation is dealt with. The "slots" is a relatively new feature.

Tomcat It seems more that they are changing, or making improvements, in how animations are assigned to different objects and some UI improvements, rather than changing/replacing the NLA system. I could be wrong (need to read up more on it), like with the new slots system, and how all animation-related panels will have playback controls.

But I can't see any changes to how NLA deals with animations.

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