Can anyone help me with rigging my character and animating it? I completely suck and hate rigging and weight painting my objects (I use blender, and can also export in many different formats). I have tried it many times before. But just fail at it. Or maybe there is another program I can use or a plug-in? I would like it to be an open source or free program. Can anyone help me? Please?
Blender is the only choice I know of for a free 3D program that will do rigging and animating. Try some different tutorials and keep practicing; it’s not something that’s trivial to do (in any 3D app).
–Eric
alright, thanks. So far there is 3 things I dont like about creating games.
- Stories (hate creating stories I’m not good at it, english+me=bad)
-Rigging and weight painting (just suck at it. always somehow screws up)
-Scripting (so confusing and hard)
Ha-ha but those are my opinions, but thanks again Eric!
Probably why Writers and TechArtists and Programmers make the big bucks (lol).
Do you have access to 3DS Max? I know of some tutorials that might help if so.
google animeeple, it might not work. It has never worked on my pc but from youtube vids. I saw, it seemed like it had all the stuff you need, besides scripting.
Alright, I’ll give it a try. And as for 3DS Max. Yes I do. Just have to reinstall it.
Heya Wade, hit me with the .blend file and I’ll do a mini tut to show you some quick ways to get decent bone heat weights in Blender with slightly less frustration.
My Skype is “woo.sah” if you want to transfer or just upload with a link here if you can.
Well I was going to give you a link and download it off of mediafire.com But I cant find the file! Its no where! Not even the recycle bin! Do you think possibly you could make a character for me? 
It was a zombie too. Spent so much time and effort on it too >.<
GOOD NEWS 
I FOUND IT HAHA! HERE YOU GO!
Way too caffeinated out to be making tutorials right now so I apologize for the jittery speaking and constant “Uhm’s” the vid quality blows as well as I have other stuff I had to get done tonight so I did a poor publish, but I think you can follow along easy enough and hit me with questions if something doesn’t work right.
One more note before going into pose mode and selecting all bones to apply the heat weights be sure to hit “CTRL+N” to recalculate the bone rolls z axis correctly. Sometimes this can mess with actions/animations you create for the rig later down the line.
Near the end I say “deformation” I meant “decent heat application”.
When I say “Special Mode” I’m referring to a unique state in blender that allows the automation of heat assignment without cage or envelope, not to be confused with standard weight paint mode.
Wow. Dude, your great at that! And I wont be able to do any of that now, I have to go to school. But after school I’ll definitely give this a try! And so when you go to apply the heat/weight. And you do CTRL+W or something. Did you cut the video and do all of the weight painting? Or did it do it all by itself? And haha at the beginning “just had the arm all messed up” yeah I wanted to try and make it look weird mutated zombie. But yes I do suck at modeling humans, so I did use make-human 'cause it’s easier. But if you would like to show me how I will follow along!
Once again thank you very much!
-Wade
Nope no camera cuts from where it begins, the application method I showed you is the fastest/easiest way to apply heat in 2.4 here’s a breakdown of the controls and steps.
Armature Selected → Goto Pose Mode.
“A” to select all bones in Pose Mode.
“Shift+RightMB” to select the Mesh. (The armature and mesh should be highlighted pink now.)
“Ctrl+Tab” goes into the special state of weight paint mode.
“W” a menu called “Specials” comes up, this is where we select vertex calc not envelopes, and also the reason we selected the Quats it provides more precise calculation.
At this point all of our bone heats are applied, but be warned make sure you put the rig into the most extreme pose before animating to make sure you didn’t miss anything, and as long as you double check for cleanup you can get away with this method of weight painting.
Alright, awesome thanks! I’ll get back to you after I do it!
And for some reason all my export options disappeared!? I only have 3 now. used to have like 15… or so. Any reason why? Or how to fix it?
See:
This one was new to me as well, a search on blenderartists showed a thread that looked like a very similar problem relating to a path issue and the py scripts related to exporting. If this doesn’t work go ahead and reinstall blender and python and if you’re still having the same problem I’ll make time for a teamview session and dig a little deeper into the problem. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=158517&page=1
I had to reinstall it. Instead of the 1st option on blender.org I clicked the .zip one. Installed blender, and I got them all back! Thank you!!
Awesome! The tut helped me so much! Thank you!!!
-wade