Anim8or Community
General Category => General Anim8or Forum => Topic started by: Pocketenix3d on February 01, 2024, 07:08:49 am
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So I've been diving deep into this program and getting into the gritty rigging and I have found certain things that are buggy, and some others that can be frustrating.
- The mirror bone function can be uninuitive. Rather than mirroring along the global axis (like the mirror tool in object mode) it seems to create a mirror copy around the bone pivot. Which means having to tweak it by manually adjusting the bones rotation. Not easy to apply when mirroring many bones at a time.
- Editing your model while rigging or when a rig is finished with weights has unexpected effects on the figures bone influences. Basically, if you edit a mesh by extruding, deleting parts, or adding polygons, it will destroy weight painting that you have done in figure mode. This doesn't apply to moving, or scaling in Point Edit mode (verts, edges, faces) but if you do anything that changes the surface of the object, then it will ruin the weights applied to the figure it's associated with. In short, you should Never make any surface changes to a mesh once it has been fully rigged.
- Editing joint limits in Sequence mode makes the bones bend at extreme angles sometimes. This would happen more frequently when i would hit undo, then try to reposition another bone.The previous bone would then instantly snap into an undesirable angle (usually the joint max or min). This would even happen with bones i moved 2 or 3 steps prior. When i tried to remedy this by adjusting or limiting the bones rotation, it would still occur when moving on to other bones. Basically means although you have the option to see and change a bones limits (min-max angles) in Sequence Mode, it is not advisable to do so. Edits to bone limits should be done in figure mode exclusively unless bones have free or no limits.
The weight paint brush is not as accurate as it seems. Even when maximizing the diameter to 50, as well as putting the strength to 1 (which should give full 100% influence to vertices), the result will still not completely give verts painted over full influence. I find myself dragging my mouse over a loop of verts about 3 times (like a Scrub motion) with the Max brush and Strength settings, and then go into Sequence Mode to bend my bone to see the results, and about half the time it still isn't enough. I realize the closer the + mark of the brush, means more of the influence, but even when zooming in and getting deeply close to a few verts, it takes about 3 paint-overs, check in Sequence mode, not enough influence, return to figure mode, paint over again 2-3 times, go back into Sequence Mode, still not enough influence, back to Figure, paint over again, back to Sequence, much more influence now. Also in between these operations involves having to select the bone over and over again then right click to get the brush out again. This is a consistent issue and makes the weight painting process very tedious. It makes a workflow very stunted.
- Sequence mode can be laggy. I like to make low-poly stuff but even when working with a model with <4000 quads while rotating around the model it will get choppy. It is slightly reduced when not viewing the Bones and The objects at the same time, but having them both visible in the rigging/animation process is not only convenient, but expected. It is definitely not a graphics issue, it seems to be the program itself. (Ive tested on multiple PCs and laptops). This seems to also happen in scene mode. Especially when having the graph editor open which is a very important thing to view when dealing with animation. Whether it is polycount, Bone count, Object count (although i doubt this) the viewport in Sequence can and will get choppy. Even when working with just 1 active viewport.
I apologize if this seems like I'm ranting (I really like this program). I intent to make tutorials and in the process of applying my amateur skills there seems to be some irregularities. I recently had to redo an entire rig because of the destructive practice of Editing my object after applying weights (which would not be an issue in other software). I'm figuring it all out and am having fun doing so.