Rigging a Fat Belly?

Rigging
1

Hey guys, currently in the process of touching up the skinning on a rig but I keep running into problems skinning the over sized belly.

I was looking around and can’t see much, apart from deformers, blendshapes and muscles. Anyone have any tips or opinions on which would work out well?

thanks in advance!

2

I’ve used muscle a few times with success. Usually to avoid having to deal with a whole muscle system for the benefit of one small part, I make 1 large muscle (or a couple times, 3 of them if dealing with love handles), add that to the skinCluster, and turn on use components on the skin. Not only does that help conserve volume, but it also brings in automatic jiggle. I usually do as much body skinning as possible (which it looks like you did) then skin to the muscle(s).

1 Like
3

The cheater’s solution, using bones, is something like

  1. For the hips, shoulders, and a mid-spine joint add locators offset forward in world space by about half of size of the belly
  2. Run a spline through the locators.
  3. Skin the spline to the locators
  4. Add a smoothCurve to the spline
  5. draw a 2 or 3 bone chain along the spline; parent it to the main body skeleton
  6. use the spline as a spline IK control to drive those bones. You might need tweak the offsets to get good positions.
  7. skin the belly to the belly chain
  8. You can add a scaling expression to make the belly scale sideways when it compresses

Most of the time I hang an extra joint of each belly bone and skin to that so I can add manual jiggles etc over the default behavior.