f r e e f a c

Hello folks. Mark Puttnam (thanks Mark!), from the well known blendernation blender news site, posted an interview he did with me. It was one of a series of interviews he did with Blender people at the Open Source Pavillion last siggraph. He asked some pretty good questions about blender, Elephants Dream, and open source/free software. Check it out if you feel so inclined.

With the imminent release of blender ( 2.43 ) I’ve decided to publish the latest version of everyone’s favourite blender test dummycharacter. This Mancandy includes stretchy, bendable limbs inspired by Disney’s Meet The Robinsons characters, and an extra set of lattice-y controls for the face, inspired by the facial rigs in the Plumiferos movie.

The leg setup took me many evenings of experimentation to get right. I showed it at the Blender conference, so I hope it’s become familiar to blender riggers and animators by now- basically, you can stretch the legs, and modify the knee position on any pose, and you can rubber-hose the legs by pulling on the controllers in the middle of the leg. Similar setups are on the arms and neck.

There’s some IKFK blend controls for the arms- these are seperate objects driving constraint channels; for the drivers to work you can:

a- animate in action mode, starting from a copy of the “driven” action.

b- animate in NLA mode, with a driven action strip with hold on in the NLA.

There are some known problems with the rig: I removed some shapes in the hip/groin/butt area because I had to tweak the base geometry, so hip deformations are rougher looking. The new stretchy stuff is in many cases tacked on to the original rig- in some cases this results in bad deforms especially in extreme cases. I’ll probably not fix these till the next version of mancandy, which will have a more or less rebuilt rig. The current rig is/should be backwards compatible with your old animations, so have fun.
This release is more or less an alpha- please test, pose and animate, and report any flipping limbs, bad deformations, and other problems here. I’d like to release a “final” version more or less with every blender release.

One last note: this version of Mancandy is designed for the 2.43 release of blender- it may break horribly on older versions. You can either wait for the official release, or better yet, download a release candidate from blender.org and start playing now.

[EDIT:]

1. fixed the armature scale bug found by Mike- new version mancandy_2.0pre2
2. renamed arm bones for backwards compatibility with version 1; turned off subsurf in OpenGL view for speed – new version mancandy_2.0pre3
3. fixed leg-lattice parenting for forward cycling; changed track of armature-object to -y for curve deform. New version mancandy_2.0pre4
4. massive cleanup, removed 10 bones, hid control objects, removed extra data, fixed some bugs. Sane rendersettings in file. New version mancandy_2.0pre5
5. a “tab-tab” fix- file had a tonne of cyclic dependancies, which were “healed” by a tab-tab. I have no idea why, too late at night to figure out, here is the update mancandy_2.0pre6