Robot Arm pt 1 - Basic Rigging

Hey Ian, love the workflow! I might have missed it but pretty sure I cant find the part where you discuss how you got the mocap to drive the IK robot arm rig? I am in the processing of doing it myself but hitting a brick wall.

Elliott Viles

This is a great tip!

Greg DiGenti

I know it's a quite old video, but damn thank you so much, in this 15 minutes I learned how to use IK. I had no idea how this works before.

Bartek L

+1 on the 15 min vids.

Both formats work. As someone who became new to blender in 2020, there are times a quick 15 is all I'm looking for, but as things get more complex it's nice to go more in depth. It's kind of the appeal of the Lazy Tutorials. "Here's an idea to get your gears turning, but if you want to know more, watch my longer video!" All that said, these tutorials are great. It's fun to laugh while I learn.

Totally! When I saw that super cool drawing, I was thinking is there no end to this man’s talent??

Greg DiGenti

I really like the format! I think more 15m videos makes it easier to go back and find bits when you're trying to find something you mentioned. Excited for more rigging videos!

Some topics can use a nice hour to sit in and watch you do things, particularly when you demonstrate the basics in the first ten minutes and then spend forty minutes going "You know what might be fun...?" A lot of the value of watching you work is how you quickly put ideas in place and go about adding complexity to scenes, which is lost when you only show the basics of a technique. If that's the point of the video then it does the job fine, but for scenes where something interesting develops I like to see those things and pick out random bits of workflow from it.

Zachary Macintyre

both type are good to me, they are both very informative

Hey Ian! I too hated parented objects to bones, until I did the following: turn off edit->lock object modes. Next, go into your armature and select pose mode. Then, you click the object to parent, then shift-click the actual bone (no switching to pose mode b/c we left it in pose mode!). Bonus point for this is to bind a hotkey to "object.parent_set" in the pose mode setting of the keymap, then making sure the "Type" dropdown is set to 'bone'. With all that you can go thru the process real fast, just two clicks and a hotkey per bone. Hope this helps, cheers!

I am firmly in the Longer Video Lover camp. You're just genuinely fun to listen to

it's that guy!

WOAAWWW THANK YOU SO MUCH !!!

I use these vids as reference and point others to them (Ie show them on my Patreon account and suggest they sub :-)) so shorter is better for me. I also just don’t have time to watch long vids in one sitting. An “easy” compromise would be shorter videos collected into playlists. Chapter marks on long videos would be as good as shorter videos for me, but I imagine that’s a lot of extra, fiddly, work. If they’re on YouTube you can turn on the auto subs- which are time stamped (and you can click to jump) and searchable. That works surprisingly well to find things- eg I use it to catch up on the adafruit circuitpython live coding stream.

Julian Rendell

Long videos for the win!

Both formats are fine, less "serendipitous" stuff happens with this kind of format but it's probably better as a reference when someone wants to find that one thing you said rather than poking through a bunch of other videos. Also! You do everything with parenting and that's cool, but I think you might have a less fiddly time with some of these if you did weight painting as you don't have to swap modes and reselect stuff so often. With a lot of your setups the auto-weights would give the same result as parenting without having to lift a finger. Give it a go some time maybe!

Max Cahill

If you usually end up re-doing things anyway, then you could please everyone by releasing longer stream-of-consciousness videos first, and then going back and releasing shorter, more easily referenced videos with everything nicely distilled down later. Though maybe that would feel too redundant. In any case, I like both formats! Though part of that may just be because I miss hanging out with you, so the longer videos kind of fill a bit of that hole in my heart. ;-)

Nathan Vegdahl

I think short videos are better because when I'm working on something and I remember something you did I can easily refind it. I mean, you could totally do one long video and do chapters in timecodes for it. Also I could just ctrl+f the auto generated transcript. Oh idk.

Harry Robins

I guess I'll be the minority opinion here... short videos as "chapters" covering just one aspect I would find it more practical when going back to reference your pearls of wisdom. But I'll side with everyone else here in saying I'd watch anything you posted! :-)

Erich Stenzel

My vote is on the longer videos but I’m good with anything!

Really looking forward to the part two re axis constraints

Double on the live stream. 👌🏿. Maybe more stressful but I would enjoy even a one off.

Chris Ak

i would love to see more of the design process! i did not know you could draw as well! its really cool to see those ideas come together in sketches and i'd watch that content for sure.

Michael Steinheiser

That's fucking awesome! Ian, your workflow is really fun to watch (not only for the things you're saying, but to see your tought process and how you solve problems). That being said, have you ever considered doing a livestram here on patreon? I think hanging out live would be pretty entertening. Anyway, love your content!

Felipe Galo

Same... long, short... don't matter to me either. I watch them multiple times, cause I'm a bit dyslexic, so I need to watch more than once anyway... or more than twice... three times maybe.... four.....Squirrel!

Doug Brown

long/short dunt matter to me, i'll ave em however they land.

Jimmy Deface

Short videos are cool but I mostly enjoy the longer sessions. They’re super informal. That 3 part green screen session was clutch. No lie, I get upset sometimes when they end. Keep em coming!

Chris Ak

I do very much like the endless stream of consciousness videos! <3 Bu I’m open to the “I guess” more practical shorter ones... It’s all the same length when I’m binging them instead of actually going anywhere near blender :p

Please upload the long version, Ian.

dude, if you uploaded 3-4 hr long un-cut versions of videos of you trying to figure things out (including the failures and crashes) i'd still watch every single one. I have learned more about blender and 3d from you in just a few months than literally any other topic of focus in my entire life. (coming from an audio engineer/musician background) Seeing mistakes and subsequently how to rectify, and deal with those mistakes; i think would make for an incredible learning experience. Especially since 90% of using blender seems to be a combination of trouble-shooting, and scream-asking "why the FUCK can't I select anything all of a sudden?!"

So rad. Thank you for the great content as always Ian. In regards to the Q, Shorter chunks or longer doesn't really matter to me personally, I'd say whatever gives you the most amount of breathing room to create and not stress out too much about making vids for patreon. The quality is always awesome, and that includes even just watching how you work on specific scenes. For example, the one where you built the hyperbole crash, I learned soooo much about workflow and various uses for things like shape keys I had never seen/thought of before. But this shorter video is also excellent, because it's an in depth exploration into a really daunting (for me at least) subject, rigging.

Gehrig Campbell-Dempsey

So the tease of the future videos and eye candy final renders at the beginning is where it's at! Also, I def want to see both boiling oil and mocap, with onions!

Lawrence Whiteside

If it helps, I like the smaller bite-size videos.