Here’s my first try at rigging characters. I think it’s perfect for first-time animators. It’s a knight with his head hammered with a huge mallet forcing his entire body to fit inside his helmet. Haha! It’s actually a rig with just the legs. A bit of flexed added to the hair to add more dynamism to the overall rig. It’s good if you want to practice your walk cycles. I included mine as a video example.

CHARACTERISTICS:
(If you are not new to rigging, you dont have to read this part) Unlike some rigs that you get, you either can’t stretch legs or you can stretch them by sliders in the foot controls. I find that if you are just learning to animate, like me, having these limitations can be really troublesome. Aside from this, most rigs have knee targets that can get in the way especially when you haven’t mastered simple steps when animating. So I have rigged my own legs-only character.

Changing the direction of the knee can easily be done by the knee control in the attributes of the foot controls. Stretching the legs are as easy as dragging the knee far from the rest of the body. The common attributes like foot roll, banking, toe bending etc are all setup for easy controlling.

Tips:

1. Alt + right clicking -> freeze rotations easily allows you to level your foot controls.
2. You could always put your environments in the environments layer to make things easy for you.
3. Right clicking on the slider beside the numbers of any numerical input attribute resets the value to 0. It’s a lot easier and quicker than entering 0, especially if you want to reset a bunch of attributes in an already animated foot control.
4. Enjoy!!!

CreativeCrash link: Litte Warrior Rig

Download link: Little Warrior Rig

OH AND IF YOU WANT TO USE IT FOR YOUR ANIMATIONS, PLEASE INCLUDE MY NAME IN THE CREDITS. JOHN DAVID MARTE (email:redesigndavid [at] gmail [dot] com website: redesigndavid.me).

I was in the Philippines last week. I garnered a total of 9 people who commented on the present status of my mid-section’s girth. Method of communication varied. But they were mostly comic. There was one I knew working in a building I used to frequent in. When he saw me after 2 years there was a huge smile on his face.

With all conviction right from the pits of his stomach, he said “Sir!!! You became fat!!!” I said “Thank you for your honestly.” He walked towards me. Again, this time with even greater enthusiasm and his head shaking in disbelief, he said “you’re soooo fat!” Another occasion was when a tipsy artist from my girlfriend’s team walked some distance just to tell me my silhouette was bulging like a tadpole. I asked if it was obvious. He said no. I said “I don’t believe you. You walked some distance to tell me I was fat. Now that we are near you say it ain’t obvious?”

LOL!! My dad told me the same thing. My brothers and sisters told me the same thing. My brother in law told me the same thing. And they have good reason to do so.

I went from a size 32 to a size 34. My brother in law told me it’s our sedentary life to blame. I hate to agree with him but it is the truth. I haven’t been running in 2 weeks months. The time I used to allot for my running was given to extra projects I committed myself to. There is just one left and I’ll be finishing this week. I can’t wait to start running again. When the time comes, I could also start scripting again. While I was contemplating on how fat sagged on top my belt no matter how many times I tried to push it in, I developed methods to easily create GUIs for your rigs. But I don’t mean just easy, I mean real easy and effective. It’s so simple I wonder why no body thought of it before. So I really really wish to work on it before some body does.

Looking forward!

If you live by the quote ‘the devil is into the details’ and yet still believe in shops like ‘forests and trees’ (goto their site or a blog about them to get an idea); if you like grunge textures, earthy or industrial; if you are in love with iron oxide, peeling paint, or unperturbed weathering of any kind; if you look for beauty in the details and in the proportions; CGTextures is something you can not do w1thout.

It requires you become a member (I just registered 15 minutes ago) and it’ll give access to hordes and hordes of textures of all imaginable sorts. Some of the major categories are Animals, Bones, Brick, Buildings, Concrete, Doors, Fabric, Food, Ground, Grunge, Ink, Landscapes, Manmade, Metal, Nature, Ornaments, Paper, Plaster, Plastic, Roads, Roofing, Rust, Scrap, Signs, Skies 360, Skies Partial, Splatter, Stone, Tiles, Various, Water, Windows, Wood, Wrinkles, X-Rays.

As a CGartist, dealing with budding not-yet-professional artists still-learning-the-ropes-and-whats-good-and-whats-not, I’m sick to the bones of fake procedurally produced textures. Making CGTextures is such an awesome find. And the textures could be used for anything, royalty-free, so long as you don’t sell the textures and you don’t redistribute them (especially not as your own).

I made sure I did not reproduce them, that’s the reason I only posted a screen shot of some of textures from the plaster section, I think. Check it out!