I’m creating a Sonic game which involves a highly-detailed character creator.
I have successfully learned how to rig models in Roblox, and my method for achieving this character creator involves creating a “base” blocky rig which looks like the following:
This rig is meant to function such that I can weld pieces from the actual character model(s) (Shown on the left for example) over the blocks and align them such that if I make all the blocks invisible and animate the block rig, it will appear as if the model on the left is the one that’s actually animating.
This has been working well in practice, but I’ve run into an issue.
What if we were to use different hands? More specifically, what if we were to use a hand which doesn’t align with the default 5 fingers on the rig?
I know one solution would be to give the rig around 8 fingers, something like this:
This would allow me to weld hands in virtually any way I want, with the red/yellow fingers only being used when a part aligns with it. For example, mittens could only use the thumb and finger 7, whereas regular hands use 1-5 and an alien-like hand might use 6, 8, and 5.
This would work, but it puts me in a position where I would have to animate 9 extra bones per hand per animation, even when they aren’t being used by the player.
As you might see in the first image, I never placed any fingers into the block rig. This is because I had another thought which drew me to make this post.
Could I instead rig hand models on their own and give them their own animations like “FistClenched” or “Point” and then weld them to the singular block which is jointed to the wrist?
If this were to work, I would then be able to create “preset” hand models which have their own animations that are operated independently. This would mean that when the character model changes an animation, I could hypothetically just tell the AnimationController within the hand models to do whatever animation would match with the current pose of the main rig.
I have two primary questions that result from this:
1. Is this possible? Or am I unable to do this because of anchoring issues?
2. If possible, is doing this method overall going to be ideal compared to animating extra bones for every single animation by default?
I’m not 100% opposed to going the initial route shown in the picture, but I do plan to also add things like tails and wings, and this would potentially introduce over a dozen MORE bones to do in every single animation whereas I could otherwise just have idle/fly animations for the wings, idle/run for the tails, etc.
Any input would be appreciated! Thanks for reading.