editing armature for big feet - help/advice

[kari1sl]

I'm making rigged mesh clown feet - long and wide (x and y) but when I rig it to a standard armature, it imports with the toes truncated and distorted.

I should mention that only the toes (mToe) are big. The actual foot (mFoot) is normal.

I've made mToe longer, and that helps a little, but it doesn't seem to get me there.

Am I going about this wrong? Suggestions?

Where might I learn how to do this?

Thanks,

 

Kari1SL

[Medhue Simoni]

I don't think you need to use mToe or mFoot at all. If you just rig the shoes to mAnkle, then it should work. As far as I know, and lets remember that I'm an animator, the toe and foot bones aren't actually used. You can use them, but this will not match the default avatar.

[kari1sl]

Thanks for the suggestion, Medhu, but rigging the shoes to mAnkle produced the similar twisted and distorted feet.

I think the ability of the armature to apply automatic weights disappears outside a certain distance; the “envelope”. I messed around with expanding the envelop and applying envelop weights but only got confused. (Easy for me to get confused... I'm new to mesh.) I made some progress making the mToe or mFoot bones longer but my feet are wide as well as long. I extruded extra toes, to fan across the y axis, but got hung up naming/assigning, and merging them.

I gave up and I found this “work around”.

Starting with “clownfeet.blend” I used vertex groups to chopped off my long toes (! - gee that sounds awful. no wonder some people are afraid of clowns) along with a smalll amount (a few triangles proximal) of the foot tip on both, then exported it as static mesh (“toes.dae” unrigged), imported it into (opensim) world, unlinked it and reassembled them into a pair of left and right toes (objects “ToesL” and “ToesR”) of 11 prims each (5 toes,, 5 nails and the base of the toes which is prim#1).

I returned to blender and, starting with new clown shoes (“clownfeet.blend”) used vertex groups to create “Toeless.dae” - which is the feet without toes but includes the foot tip, which it shares with “toes.dae”. Rigged “Toeless.dae” to my standard avatar (normal mToe and mFeet) using automatic

weights and exported (using the Opensim presets for “Rigged mesh”).

I imported the rigged mesh into world, attached it to the default position (Left Hand) on my avatar (wearing a mask to hide the default feet/skin and on a pose stand) and they popped into place were they belong.

Then I attached “ToesL” to my avatar's Left Foot and “ToesR”to my avatar's Right Foot. A few minutes of positioning and “ToesL” lined up with its rigged partner on the left. Copied the position of “ToesL” to “ToesR”, reversed the Y-axis sign and .. I've got clown feet!

I hopped off the pose stand and was happy to see the toes keeping up seamlessly with the rigged mesh. Two challenges remain.

I want to find an animation to flex the ankle to see if the whole thing moves naturally. I'm guessing it should work.

So far I've used only simple textures across the seam, but I'm going to test my patience and push my luck to get shoes covered in stars and dots to span the foot-to-toes seam.

 

Regardless, I'm walking on clown feet!!!

Kari1sl

[Medhue Simoni]

Weight painting is not that big a deal. I have a video on Weight Painting in Blender. I use Avastar also, but it's not much different if you don't use avastar. You'll just have different weights to start with. The actual weight painting parts works the same without Avastar. Just search for Medhue Weight Painting on Youtube.