How Often do you Flexibind vs. Bind Points?

[jayfaker]

So I'm working on rigging my first complex character and I'm running into a lot of distortion issues that I could take a lot of time adjusting with bone actions (smooth joints won't work here), but I have seen that some of you still use point-binding for some things. I know some of you swear by one method over the other, but some of you may mix the two methods.

So here's a question for you guys. How often do you use flexibinding vs. point binding? What reasons would you use one vs. the other?

Thanks!

Jim

[3deeguy]

I never use flex binding. I use only Layer, point and SmartBones.

[dueyftw]

I agree with 3deeguy. But I use Flexibind when I'm in a hurry or just lazy. Some of the animation I do is just fine with out doing a better rig.

Dale

[Greenlaw]

My rigs are typically hybrids of techniques, using whatever works best for a given effect. Mostly I prefer to use the Selected Bones for Flexibinding command which, IMO, offers the best of both worlds--binding a layer to a bone and also deforming the points smoothly without having to offset the drawing.

Binding points directly to bones is just little too rigid for me. I like the nice falloff I get with Flexibinds. I use Smart Bones a lot for any joint deformation corrections.

When deformation isn't needed, only translation with a bone, then I just bind directly to a bone--it's far less CPU intensive and any deformation method, which can make a difference if you have a lot of characters or deforming objects in a scene.

G.

[jayfaker]

I'm a little like greenlaw. I like flexibinding with selected bones because of the falloff, as it seems less stiff. The challenge seems to come from the very different results you can get from small differences in bone placements,sizes, and strengths, in conjunction with the placement of points. If you do it all right, using actions to fix joints works pretty well, but if you don't, a single action keyframe on points will result in the points swirling as they move to the new position, because the points are moving in a linear path to the new position, while being affected by the rotational forces of multiple bones. So you either have to go back and guess and check different bone placements/sizes/strengths or you have to strong arm the action with keyframes on every frame, which is a lot of work and usually doesn't look very good.

But all that trouble makes me wonder about point-binding. If you use point-binding, I guess you could use point-level-animation on bone actions or bone constraints to create less stiff characters. Would it be more or less work? Would the results be better or worse? I dunno. I'll go try it.

But if any of you have any more input, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

Jim

[Greenlaw]

Another tip: I like to keep a version of a rig on-hand that has fewer bells and whistles for easy editability. I came to the conclusion a while ago that, no matter how 'universal' you make your rig, it's never going to be able to do everything it needs to so, so I keep a version that's easily adaptable for special situations. Sometimes it's much easier to modify a simpler rig to do what you need in a given scene than it is to modify a very complicated one.

Also, since we can open multiple scene files simultaneously now, it's easy to swap out the character features you might need between different scenes, so there is less need to try to embed everything into a single rig.

G,