Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Here is my experience of the rig.
It's nice especially given that there is a large lack of animal rigs out there, but it has a lot of range of motion issues.
The legs are set up incorrectly there should be 3 bones going down the leg but there are only two. so it looks like it's walking with a stiff foot most of the time.
The tail is a hazard to animate and requires tons of frames, it should have been a simple fk setup but instead it's ik for some reason.
I feel like have almost no control over where I want to trunk to go and i'm sure it would be next to impossible to animate the trunk grabbing a large object.
This is an excellent rig, the textures loaded just fine with my dl. Renders beautifully and lifelike. I like the movement options, the elephant's rear can swing and its trunk and tail are rigged with good controls. Good work!
Great rig overall, but still room for improvement.
Here are couple notes how you can improve:
- control of his eyes, including eye lids
- trunk has "two fingers" on the tip of its trunk that is used to grab objects with
- feet has elastic spongy cushion to absolve impact, so feet needs squash and stretch controls
- front feet ankles need to be fixed, front ankles work like human knees
https://elephant.elehost.com/About_Elephants/Anatomy/anatomy.html
watch this video and notice how the feet squash when touch the floor and how front ankles need to bend
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtIz1u8g1F0&feature=related
Thanks for sharing the rig, this is a great start
looking forward to see new updates
I can't understand the positive reviews of this rig. Initially I thought it was a very good rig, and I do like the charcater model/design, but when I attempted to animate it I found that the ankles are positioned in completely the wrong place, and so this spoils the anatomy. If you try to animate the correct positions on the feet it's impossible to get the correct shapes. I had to abort this work and start again in Softimage XSi which comes with an excellent free elephant rig in the student edition. I do not regret it because the work I did with that rig turned out really well and it is brilliantly modelled, textured and weighted. The rig is a standard quadruped rig.
Take great care if you do animate this rig because those ankles are way off, sorry.
