I’m using Harmony 14. So I watched this toon boom webinar that had a dog and an elephant rig. The dog rig is what I am interested in. It’s a cutout rig and she used IK for easy movement of the joints but she also used Envelope deformers for adjusting the thickness of the legs and muscles.
I tried making a rig with IK cutout and added the envelope deformers on to parts of it. When you add the deformers the pivot point will jump to the starting position in the scene but will still rotate in the original pivot when only using the deformer to move the piece. This also messes up all the IK because the IK bones will all point to that offset pivot point for the starting position of the scene. I searched to see if anyone else asked this question and it seemed most people said you can’t mix IK rigs with Bone deformers. But the person has done just that in this video with the dog rig…
https://youtu.be/uaOw7-0tVnE
Does anyone know how this person did that? At 3:53 she uses IK for the leg and at 8:17 she uses the envelope deformation to adjust the leg.
I hope that makes sense.
Thank you!
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
Are you still trying to figure out this issue? I might be able to help.
You wrote:
When you add the deformers the pivot point will jump to the starting position in the scene . . .
I am guessing that you have set each drawing to “Apply Embedded Pivot on Parent Peg” prior to adding deformers. When you add deformers in between a drawing and peg, the peg’s pivot will no longer use the embedded pivot on the drawing to determine its position. So after you added deformers, you need to use one of advanced animation tools to properly set the pivot for the peg.
You wrote:
. . . will still rotate in the original pivot when only using the deformer to move the piece.
If you want to follow what she is doing for the dog, you need to use pivots as parents of your Deformers and drawings to drive your cutout parts. In this case, use Defomers only to “adjust” the shape of the parts (for matching the seams, or adding curve to your parts). If you use Defomers to translate/rotate/scale, your pivot will not follow the Deformers and ended up in the undesirable positions. Also make sure not to have any Defomers being a parent of a peg.
If it gets confusing, I suggest you to create a rig without Deformers. After you confirm that your rig is working, then add Deformers. Make sure to set pivot for pegs using Advanced Animation tools in this case.
If you post the Node and Camera views of your rig, I will understand better about how you are trying to set up.
Yueda1984! Thank you so much! It worked! You knew exactly what I did. I made a new rig and adjusted the pivots manually for the pegs. It worked. I added the deformers after making sure all the IK worked properly. The only thing I’m guessing you can’t do is do this for full rotating rigs since manually adjusting the pivot for the pegs are not animatable.
Thank you so much for taking the time to help me out!