For the past two days I've been trying to rig this model and I've run into dead ends everywhere. I tried TSM2 first but I get all the way up to running the rigger, and it gets almost to the end, and it has an error and chases A:M away. I've redone all the steps from scratch three times, and it still crashes and burns. If anyone wants to try it, I can post the file.

So I tried the 2001 rig, and that was going well, until I tried to set up constraints for the fan bones, but the arm and leg bones didn't show up in the relationship, and I couldn't get them to show.

Had the A.R.M. still been up ,I would have tried building the 2001 rig from scratch from the "How it Works" tutorial,(That's how I did the polar bear) but I can't do the "Lock Hands" poses without it.

That was the great thing about the A.R.M., it was a big repository of rigging info. I was just starting to study it again when they bombed it...

That's the thing that seems to be lacking; information on building rigs from scratch. I enjoyed having an understanding of what was going on with the polar bear, and I'd like to learn more...

For the 2001 rig, go into the models user properties and turn off the IK legs and IK arms setup before setting up the contraints for the fan bones.

Cool, I'll try that now.

post the file

Is this the site for the 2001 rig that you lost?

http://www.eggington.net/Hash/2001RigDocs/intro.html

Yup, Caroline, that's the one! Thanks!

Robcat, here's the file. AFAIK, she should be ready to rig. I did everything by hand, too. I didn't try to use MirrorBone to mirror the weighting, nor did I use MirrorConstraints.

Click to view attachment

Good news and bad news....

the good news is Rigger ran fine for me. I sent you a link to the rigged model. you can edit you post above to take your link out.

the bad news is I don't know why it didn't run for you. You're on V15 andI'm on v13 but other people have used V15 with success.

when you have time you might try running rigger with everything set to "dont' rig" except "spine" and see if it still crashes. If it doesn't try adding a few more body aprts until you find the one that crashes.

if it does crash with "spine" on try a different body part and see if it still crashes.

you can at least find out if it's Rigger itself or a specific body part that is the problem.

I've only crashed Rigger when I've been writing my own TSM scripts and mispelled a bone name. But I presume you aren't doing that.


Have you added any other 3rd party plugins to hxt?

I tried it with 15c and it didn't crash.

BTW, I also notice that you have some cps on the left arm that are assigned to the right arm (right upper arm1)

I've run into similar problems with TSM2. Should I be doing the same thing, i.e., turning off the IK setups before creating the cog joint constraints?

That will help.

However, the most important thing is to make sure you are attaching your cogs to the actual geometry bones and not control bones that TSM2 adds. TSM2 hides most of the geometry bones so it's easy to go wrong.

The easiest time to add fanbones (or weight CPs) is before you run TSM Rigger. YOu can test them by opening an action and using the rotate manipulator to move bones individually. For example, if you are testing a right elbow fan, you'd use the rotate manipulator to move "1 right lowerarm1" and watch the elbow fan while you do. Then go back to your pose or model window to make any tweaks.

TSM Rigger will preserve your fanbones when it does its thing.

I was pretty careful in putting in the fan bones and following the TSM instructions. But when I move the controller bones in the chor (the ones left visible after the rigger is run) the fan bones stay frozen. I'll take another run at it today or tomorrow.

Are you sure you turned your poses ON in the choreography, Gerry?

TSM Constraints has to be turned ON, and also your own pose where you created your own constraints has to be ON. You can set them to be permanently ON in User Properties under the model's properties.



I have been weighting my shoulder joint after the final TSM Rigger, and that seems to be working well, so you can fine tune it after TSM Rigger. I have been doing that to make sure that the actual TSM visible bones are working on my extra bones in the way that I think they ought to.