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The Stickman Rig

This is the Stickman rig that I walk you through creating in Chapter 11. I love using this little guy to block out my animations and get the timing right before moving on to do more detailed work. So go ahead and have fun with him! Dissect him and his rig to see how they work. And of course, I’d love to see any animations you come up with.

A couple notes:

Stickman’s leg bones are on Armature Layer 8 (the first layer in the second block of Armature Layer buttons). I’d recommend hiding that layer
There is no IK on Stickman’s arms. If you want to use IK there, you’ll have to either add it yourself or work around it by using the AutoIK button in the Armature panel. That won’t give you real IK (you’ll have to key all bones in the arm rather than just a single controller), but it will allow you to place the arm where you want it to be.
Have fun!

Files:

stickman.blend

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 12:23 pm and is filed under All Files, Ch. 11 Files. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “The Stickman Rig”

Jeroen Mank says:

April 1, 2009 at 4:38 am

Hoi Jason,

First of all many thanks for this well written and entertaining guide through Blender.

I’m working through the book cover to cover and i came across a fault in this chapter (11) when i tried to rig stickman. @page 267 step 3 your instruction is “Disconnect leg_IK.L from leg_lower.L (ALT+P -> Disconnect Bone).” However, when I tried to add the IK chain in step 5 I got the error message “IK tip cannot be linked to IK root”. After some experimenting I found out that instead of choosing ‘Disconnect Bone’ you should choose ‘Clear Parent’ in step 3. And then it all seems to work

Thought I should tell you this ( and everone else who cares to read this)

Greetings from Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Jeroen
Jason says:

April 1, 2009 at 6:06 am

Hi Jeroen. This is a good catch. Thanks for pointing that out. The ‘Disconnect Bone’ option retains the parent-child structure between these bones and for creating an IK control, that’s clearly not something you want. This appears to be an oversight on my part. I’ll make sure that this gets fixed in future printings of Blender for Dummies.

Thanks again for pointing this out and thank you for reading my book!
Ron Harris says:

July 5, 2009 at 11:12 am

When you create a symmetrical armature, you should use Shift-E instead of E to extrude the first bone in a branch and blender will create left and right side bones at the same time and name them automatically with L’s and R’s. That information should have been in this chapter. Or am I missing something.
Jason says:

July 5, 2009 at 2:57 pm

Hello Ron,

The hotkey you mention does in fact exist, but it all really depends on workflow. Shift+E is a good shortcut, however more common usage (especially for beginners) is to build one half the rig first and then mirror (Ctrl+M) and adjust when you’re done with that. I did actually consider mentioning the Shift+E hotkey, but for space and simplicity, I decided to leave it out.
Ron Harris says:

September 5, 2009 at 6:37 am

I should’ve added that you must have X-axis mirror enabled on the armature menu in the buttons windows before Shift+E works for simultaneious symmetrical extrusion.
Ron Harris says:

October 25, 2009 at 11:00 am

At this link

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/armature-editingposing/

It says:

“There are now three new tools in the WKEY menu for Armatures in EditMode/PoseMode. These add .* extensions to the names of selected bones based on their position in 3d-space on the axis considered by that tool. They will remove any existing extensions for various sides.”

I just checked and these tools are still there (2.49b). Haven’t tried them but might be a good thing for us dummies to know about.