Foot Roll description

[xzof]

Hello, I'm looking for some documentation, help or tutorial to see how works the foot roll of the biped. I have tried to see by myself, but it's a bit fuzzy like the roll controller which links nothing in the schematic. I'm from maya, and I wasn't using that way for controlling feet. I like the xsi way, but I want to know deeply how it's made.

Cheers.

[cgisims]

In older versions of XSI, they let you see the scripted operator for the footroll, but in later versions, they have hidden it for some reason....

The roll controller you referred to that is empty is actually being linked to the bone rotation (or control object that controls the bone rotation ) through a scripted operator. If you select RFootGuide2 and hit conrol + K (to bring up the local transform ppg ) you can see an "S" icon on the local X rotation field. That means the X rotation is being controlled by a scripted operator, but if you try and click on it to view it, somehow they've hidden it so you can't. Basically it's just some code that links the rotations to the controller object and tells them how to behave.

I picked it apart a long time ago, and you can actually do pretty much the same thing with some expressions. If you search on www.xsibase.com, someone posted pretty recently on footroll setups, and there was some good discussion on the subject, and some of the guys posted some scene files to look at.

http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=11;action=display;threadid=32647

I don't like how the biped rig uses 3 bones for the foot, so my setups usually use 2 bones, and it's all how you setup the constraints and hierarchy. I then use expressions to have all the different rotations controlled by one object, so that I don't have to have 4-5 different control objects on the foot. You can check out an older rig I did that's free for download that is similar to the biped guide.

http://www.highend3d.com/xsi/downloads/character_rigs/Guy-4907.html

The great thing about that foot setup (even though it's a bit outdated and has no FK switcher ) is that I've set it up in Maya and Max also and it translates really well into other packages, because all it uses is constraints, parent/child relationships, and some simple expressions which pretty much all packages support. The foot setup in the 3dquakers video tutorials is quite good, although if I were to rig a character soon, I would probably use a hybrid of my old techniques, and the ones Charbel shows.....

good luck and happy rigging....