Rigging and bone problems and new flares

Unhinged!

New hinge system ready to be rigged.

 I finally threw myself into the Blender rigging. I was firing on all cylinders, raring to go, but I repeatedly bounced off the wall. This stuff is hard, or I'm really stupid. Wait! I know I'm stupid, but both cases could be simultaneously true. You can see why this is making me glum.

The problem: Rigging uses several interconnected systems, all entirely new for me. This is animation, of which I know almost nothing. This type of animation uses an armature system, like an old-fashioned puppet's wood-pins-and-string skeleton. I don't know anything about armatures. Except, they're made out of bones. Bones define where movement happens, what constraints are placed on the movement, and what effect movement has on the overlayed mesh. Bones seem hard. There are many hidden rules about how all these systems relate and interact.

Like so many problems, this one started with YouTube—lots of YouTube! I've watched about six videos on rigging rigid-body systems, like pistons and hinges, but it hasn't sunk in.

So what next? Training—proper Training! It just so happens there's a good Udemy Blender animation course on sale. So, I enrolled and will gradually work through 8 hours of knowledge.

This has been dispiriting, but it reminds me of the first few hours of using Blender. Crushing ignorance weighs you down, but if you are patient, you slowly make your way up the wall. Tomorrow, I will climb that wall!

Why do I need this knowledge? It's that hinge system! I rebuilt it so that it straddles the support rings instead of working only off one ring. Well, it made sense at the time, although I'm still not sure that if I rig this system up, it will actually work as expected.

FLARED!!!

I bought an add-on for lens flares (Flared XT). Seriously, you can't go into space without beautiful blooms and flare artefacts. This one works well, although it also works surprisingly weirdly. You'd think the addon did some kind of post-production magic through the compositor, but oh no. It generates in-scene transparencies, which create the effect directly through the render engine (Cycles or EeVee).

Bloom transparencies in the viewport and the output result

One limitation of this technique is that you must greatly increase the number of transparency layers supported in Cycles. I think I had to go up to 200. Eevee is unaffected as it supports unlimited transparency layers.

Flare!

Ring of flare!