Hi guys,
I usually use biped for rigging, but I got a pretty complicated character to rig recently and actually made a custom rig for it which is a combination of biped, CAT and custom bones. I would not do it the same way again, it is a bit of a monster, but I have done a set of animations on it and want to be able to use, them, rerigging it isn’t really an option. The problem I can see now is that I have placed my controllers in the skeleton hierarchy rather than using external constraints, so now I am finding it impossible just to export the bones without the controllers. The only way that I have worked out is to use a script MB_collapse script from scriptspot.com, which collapses animation to individual bones, however this destroys the bone hierarchy completely. I would prefer if I could get just a skeleton with a proper hierarchy exported, but all I can think of at the moment is perhaps creating a separate export skeleton and constrain it to the rig skeleton.
The rig itself was hard to make, it is basically a monster with 6 tentacles holding up a human body, which had to pull parts of the body off in the animation. I would probably try to use all CAT if I did it again, but for now I have to deal with this mess. Any help is appreciated!
The main problem area seems to be the tentacles, the parts being held up are basically the controls, and the end of a HI IK solver is parented to the control helper, and the bones coming off the part are also parented to the control helper. As a consequence I can’t get rid of the helper without losing the link between the tentacle and the part’s bones.
