Rigging burnout

 I'm taking a break from failing at rigging. I could feel my confidence and enthusiasm melt whenever my attempt to build a simple rig ended messily. I've got something fundamentally wrong and baked it into my practice without realising it.

I need to start from scratch with a fresh head, make more notes, and do more troubleshooting and error searches to get to the bottom of the problem. It could also be that my rig requirements are quirky and actually more difficult than they look.

I'll return to the container vessel soon.

I played with True-Terrain 5. It's a lot of fun, but I still need to learn how to use it properly. I started to think about writing a guide—initially to build my understanding, but maybe it could be something I could share or even become commercial. First, I'd need to write and polish a chapter or two.

Terrain! 

Base scene

Pumped!

 This morning, I completed a couple of hours of animation training using a Udemy course. It's very good! It's easy to follow and pitched at the right level for me. Sadly, it's already run through the elements that I needed training on. The next six hours are about character rigging rather than rigid bodies. I'll complete the course, but not as a matter of urgency.

I did get a better understanding of some of the foundational animation, amature, parenting, and bone systems, which was helpful to build upon. So, what to do about my rigging woes? I went back to the YouTube videos and rewatched them, and it really helped. I got stuck, and things went wrong, but I went back to the very first video I watched—just one minute long—and I managed to replicate it. It's proof that I'll get what I need eventually.

A pump-type thing with a rigged piston.

A couple of flaws:

The piston rod and leave are not perfectly aligned. You can't see it here, but on the other side of the pump you can see them becoming superimposed. You must use the Shift+S tools that move an object's origin or 3D cursor.

The bone constraint "Limit rotation" wasn't quite working correctly. Pulling or pushing the pump too far separates the rod from the sleeve or pushes the rod impossibly deep so that it goes through the sleeve's pivot. Using the Limit Rotation constraint stops the bone from moving through an impossible axis, such as sideways instead of along the lever's arc. It should also let you set a maximum and minimum allowed angle of rotation to stop things from breaking. It just wasn't working for me. I must not have been reading the angle correctly.

Things I learned today:

When creating bones to use in an amature, duplicate them from existing bones. If you use Add>Armature>Single Bone, the resulting bone is part of a new amature, and you won't be able to parent it with an offset. I saw several commons on various rigging videos where viewers had experienced the same confusion.

Flipping between the modes can be a source of confusion if you slip into the wrong mode:

Object Mode: Move objects, no interaction with a bone's elements.

Edit Mode: Move bones and bone elements. For example, change the size of the bone. In fact, all you can do is add more bones, which will be added at the 3D cursor.

Pose Mode: Move bones within an armature, such as when posing a rig. 

To modify a bone or Parent a mesh to a bone, ensure you're in the edit mode.
To move a bone's position in a rig, ensure you're in pose mode.

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!