notes - christopher rutledge kinefx videos

general character rig workflow -

exoside quad remesh

labs 3d straight skeleton, fuse, delete half (for mirroring), resample.

use cgwiki matt estela's edge transport distance attrib propogate trick to reorder vert numbers

(edge transport "(distance)", promote to primitive (don't delete origintal), sort by distance, polypath)

rig doctor

mirror rig

joint capture biharmonic for mesh capture. joint capture paint to tweak any specific weights

stash captured geo and skele, externally(!)

plug all into joint deform.

rig wrangle to use curl noise vector attrib to mess with joint rotation/scale/pos.

he sets poses with multiple rig pose nodes. Then switch-nodes between them using a $F and modulo expression. This is nice for stepped anim style, but if you want to inbetween them,

Use a "smooth motion" node. It's used for fixing jittery mocap - but it also provides a nice tween between the different rig poses.

Another novel blending approach is to put the step anim through a solver. Inside the solver use a skeleton blend with the previous frame, using a blend value of less-than-one, for an interesting ramped blend between poses.
This can also be used with stepped blend shapes(eg for a stepped mountain sop anim). Smooth motion seems to have some nice secondary motion built in.

There is a secondary motion sop node which lets you specify a driver joint & the group to affect. Typically these will be joints down the hierarchy, eg in a tail/whip/arm. Also has some effect features - lag/overshoot, jiggle and gravity.

simple rigging setups using kinefx

 

typical basic kinefx rigging for organicish shapes

simple rigid body FK rig. Key points are packing each rigid part, and using the capture packed geo node. make sure the skeleton points are at the desired pivot points.

basic setup here - line as a skeleton, isolate the FBIK controller points. the MATCH BY ATTRIBUTE setting is usually what makes things work! Also on the FBIK node, you might need to tweak the tolerance parameter.

fusing geo using uv attribute (eg. separated head from neck)

Lets say you've separated the head geo from the body for rigging purposes or otherwise.
How do you glue it back together reliably, without resorting to many individual vertex pair selections and fusing each?
UV's! As long as your mesh has good non overlapping UV's (which existed before you chopped it), you can promote them from vertex to point (might as well give it a new name, and keep the originals for actual texture use) then specify this new attribute at the Match Attribute (see below). Turn off Snap Distance, as the UV data is what will snap vertices/points together (in this case I've called it fuse_uv). I've left everything else in the Fuse node as default.
This is super handy especially if your model's point count is not fixed (eg you're not sure where you're cutting the model yet)

decent kinefx primer youtube playlist

 More of a reminder for myself... Quite a good primer on Kine FX, full body IK, posing and animation
https://youtu.be/S4Bzhnepovk

Reorient joints

Simply rotate the bone (might be best to do this in the bind pose frame) to the orientation you want & hit the Align Capture Pose button in the Rigging shelf. Remember to clean the rotations out of the joint and adjust the child-bones too (maybe there is a way to fix a joint without affecting it's children? un parent first maybe)

Update - the bracketed suggestion works.. remember to turn on the Keep Position When Parenting when you detach though...