I was rigging one of my own characters using the 2001 rig. I was following in the manual about how to install it and everything seemed to be OK. I changed some of the bones' positions to make it more symmetrical. Then I added a bunch of fan bones to help with the joints.

Somewhere during all of this, I must have messed things up because the rig does not behave at all like the characters that come on the CD. If I try to raise the foot off the ground, the foot target pulls away from the foot and the knee will not bend.

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Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this problem? I am hoping there is a simple fix for it because I really don't want to go back and start all over from scratch. I spent a lot of time on this already.

Thanks for your help!

I think it might be hard for someone to track down what you may have
screwed up in the rig....but I will say that the 2001 rig is a bit complex and not exactly
necessary to be so.

If you go to my web site there is a section about installing a stripped down version
of the 2001 rig that you may find easier to install and use.

www.3dartz.com

Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com

What you're saying is that everytime you made a change you saved over the same file? Or hadn't even been saving at all?

There's a lesson here

Each of the asterisks above would definitely be a time to save a version of your model.

model_001
model_002
model_003

Then, you'd be able to go back to the version just before the trouble started instead of having to go back to the very beginning.

I'm guessing you altered the heirarchy of the bones accidentally. Or maybe have some CPs mis-assigned. But not knowing how you did it makes it tough to diagnose.

Thanks, Mike. I don't like the autobalancing stuff either. I think I will remove it as well and follow your simplified rig.

One other thing: It puzzles me why someone would make such a complex rig and not even make it symmetrical. Maybe it doesn't really need to be, but I feel like my models are symmetrical, my bones should be as well. Maybe I am too nitpicky... especially for a newbie.




Actually, my problem is the opposite of what you're implying. I actually saved too much! I pretty much did it exactly like you said, too. I named it model_v001, and so on. It works well if A:M crashes and I need to go back one version. Where it doesn't work well is trying to go back through all those different versions later and trying to figure out what was going on. For example, I can't recall what I was doing between versions 027 and 028 or whatever the numbers were. If there is any lesson to be learned here, it's that I need to make more descriptive save filenames!!!

You were right on the money about heirarchy, though! I opened the 2001 rig into my project and started comparing it with my model's skeleton. It seems some of the fan bones I had added knocked the calf bones down in the heirarchy so "Attached to Parent" was no longer working.