Generi Model and Rig Ported to Blender
Karl wrote:
To celebrate the release of Blender 2.46 and Big Buck Bunny (okay, and as an excuse to play around with Blender’s cool new features!), I’ve ported Andrew Silke’s well-known “Generi Rig” to Blender. Generi is a very popular Maya rig that’s regularly entered into animation competitions such as 11 Second Club, and now Blender users have access to him too! :)
Features include:
– IK/FK limbs with support for length stretching
– Automatic eyelid tracking as the eyes move, which can be manually overridden or turned off entirely.
– An advanced aim system for the head and eyes, which allows them to be aimed or manually rotated.
– Reverse-foot IK leg setup with foot/toe roll.
– Facial shapes from the original rig, complete with a driver-based interface
– Facial modifiers for the jaw, the brow, the tongue, the nose, upper and lower teeth, and even the ears.
Please note that the rig requires Blender 2.46 or higher to function properly.
The rig’s available for download from my website:
Editor note: The model is free for Non Commercial purposes only.
All feedback or bug reports are welcome. I hope to see some cool Blender 11 Second Club entries some day soon! :)
Karl
Website: http://www.kreanimate.co.uk
IP: 82.3.227.110
Thanks for the post. This rig is cool and have funny features.
My content filter gives me
Virus or bad content detected. HTML.IFrame-10
when clicking on the link to Andrew Silkes
I am on Linux so no real worries here but for the less fortunate :)
I’ll probably learn tricks from it :-) Cheers!
Hmm, looks like my hosting company’s database server’s not quite as bulletproof as they advertised :( If any of you are having trouble downloading it, try the direct link below:
http://www.kreanimate.co.uk/Rigs/05_2008_Generi/GeneriRig_v1_1.blend
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Karl
@ ccherrett:
Nothing to worry about, it turns out it’s a javascript trick to cloak email addresses that’s tripping your filter. If you have a look at the page source on Andrew’s website, you’ll see it’s nothing malicious! :)
Thanks for “Generi Rig”. Downloading now.
Wayhay! Good work!
This is great – I’ve wanted to use this rig for years – nice one!
Hehe, I animated with this rig on a Maya course. It’s very nice.
Its a good rig, very fun to play with.
its seems like the file isn’t working. I have the latest version of blender and its giving me a “file incomplete error”
I got it.
Great rig! I can’t seem to get the stretchiness options though….
Thanks guys, glad you like it! :) I got some emails from people reporting trouble with IK/FK switching and with the “rounded corners” shape; I’ve fixed these bugs and re-released Generi. If you’re one of these unlucky people, please download it again to pick up the bugfixes.
@ mikahl:
Activating stretchiness should be as simple as selecting one of the controls and scaling it. Try selecting one of the spine controls or limb controls and scale it with the ‘s’ key. Note that stretching the FK arm/leg controls will only work when the gauge next to them is in “fk mode”, and likewise for IK. Hope this clears things up, feel free to drop me a mail if not :)
Karl,
Well I am glad you are so confident in it
Karl,
I did not realize that viewing the source of a webpage was enought to determine if there is a virus embedded in the page or in a link.
How exactly do you determine that it is a javascript that is tripping the filter?
I am very much into the content filter game and would love to know how you figured this out.
Holy crap, that’s an excellent rig. I don’t know what the original rig was like, since I never used maya, but the port sure looks nice. I like how you can scale the master bone and everything scales along. I’ve had some trouble getting that to work…
Awesome I gotta play with this later.
thanks..!! thanks..!! thanks..!! thanks..!! thanks..!!
=^.^=
Nice Rig :)
Bravo, Karl! What a great resource to have available! Thanks for the rig and all it’s set-up!
Hey,
I’ll let fight this one against Blender’s Mancandy – you can guess who wins ;-)
Karl, thanks for the rig port. I have 2.46 and can mess around with the rig fine(posing etc.) but can’t insert keyframes for animation. Pressing Ikey does nothing! Even selecting Object->Insert Keyframe from the header in the 3D window does nothing.
I am using 2.46 official build on linux and don’t have a problem inserting keyframes in my blend files; only this file seems to mess up something in blender. Could someone verify this problem or better tell me what the workaround/correct way is?
Thank you for the rig I felt really you’ve done a fantastic job this is the best rig I have seen to blender great job
An advertisement for a copied rig? No, thanks… ;)
Having absolutely no experience with character animation (in *any* software) I downloaded this guy to play around. I have to say I’m really having fun making him move and look around.
What I’d love to see is a video tutorial or two explaining how to animate in Blender using this rig. I can make him lift his arm and other simple things, but I’d really love to see how someone who knows what he’s doing brings this dude to life.
I’ve been tempted to buy the ManCandy DVD, but have been reluctant to do so because it looks so complex. This guy looks a little more simplistic and might be an excellent “first time” for character animation virgins like me.
Thanks everyone, really great to know you’re all enjoying Generi :)
@ Genscher :
Now that I’d pay to see! :D
@ dodobrain:
Sorry to hear you’re having trouble setting keys! I’ve tested it with the official build and a hand-compiled build on Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian, and all of them have managed to key just fine. I’ve managed several animations with him over the last few weeks so I’m pretty sure the rig is OK… Perhaps check if the file was corrupted during download? Or try temporarily moving your ~/.B.blend so you can see if it’s your local settings messing up? Maybe someone’s reported something similar in the Blender bugtracker?
@ Freakydude:
I love your stick rigs! :) Agreed on the all-scaling, it’s not easy. If you can get it working non-uniformly (ie stretching) then you’re officially a grand-master-rigging ninja :D
@ccherrett:
Sure, any web page boils down to a set of HTML tags. I knew you were being warned about an iFrame, so I looked for the javascript in the page that was generating this iFrame, and downloaded the remote script it was calling with wget. I then examined it with a text editor to see what it was doing, and it all seemed pretty harmless to me… I’ve dropped an email to Andrew Silke to be on the safe side though.
@ DarrenW:
Everyone has to start somewhere! :) I started with Generi several years ago, which is why I thought it’d make such a nice gift to the Blender community. If you’re looking to get started animating, I’d suggest reading the Blender wiki page about it first (to understand how the software works), then start looking further afield for information on the art of animating. Keith Lango’s website, 11 Second Club and “The Animator’s Survival Kit” are all great places to start. I wish you the best of luck!
Karl, It seems to be keying fine now. I got rid of my .B.blend file and also re-downloaded the rig, although I couldn’t see(diff) any difference between the old and the new file.
Anyway, it is working now and I am happy :)
@ Karl: Well I know what my next challenge will be :) (btw, my current versions of the stickfigure still have bugs, I have fixed “standard” versions and am working on a working stretch)
I’ve been looking through the bones, and it certainly is a complex and complete setup rig. Impressive. How long did it take you to convert him?
@dodobrain and Karl:
I’ve had the same keying issue with all my current rigs. Whatever it was, it wasn’t because of your generi rig.
@ FreakyDude:
In total Generi took me between three and four weeks; however each ‘day’ was mainly just a few hours here or there to kill boring train journeys. I also made a lot of mistakes along the way due to my brain still working in Maya-mode (one particularly large mistake forced me to redo a week’s work!). I think it would be perfectly possible to rig him in a week or two knowing what I know now… But hey, hindsight always comes too late, doesn’t it? :)
If you need any help working out what parts of the rig do, don’t hesitate to drop me an email. Building rigs is so much easier than taking them apart!
Awesome Karl, thanks for the tip
Hello,
I can’t get a sound file to play while using this model. It doesn’t play when I drag through the timeline or press the left and right arrows. It only plays when I press Alt-A. Am I doing something stupid or is something wrong?
you need to enable the scrub option (in the button panel press F10 for render settigns, choose the most right button in the header for the sound options and enable scrub)