Bones, Rigging, IK/FK, and Parameters for My Robot Arm in DAZ Studio / Bryce Pro 7?

White Rabbit

Hi all,

Okay, I have been working on a simple robot arm model in Bryce, and I want to add bones, and joints to be able to rotate, move, position the pieces of the robots arms, gripper, and so on from inside DAZ Studio from the Parameters Tab. Tricky stuff it seems to me? Where do I start on this I wonder? Are there any wonderful tutorials that you could point me to please? I have done a little rigging in Softimage and Maya so I know this stuff can get very involved I am sure. Eventually, I would like to add limits to the rotations of the robots limbs, and learn about IK / FK in DAZ. If you add bones in DAZ Studio, and then send to Bryce, does Bryce keep all these and allow editing of the bones and parameters?

Any help would be more than appreciated!
:-)

Thank you!

Richard Haseltine

Bryce itself does does not have or use rigging. The main drawback you are likely to run into, creating the mesh in Bryce, is that I don't think it will be properly grouped - that's useful when creating a new-style TriAx figure, and vital with the legacy parametric rigging system (which may be the best option, assuming your robot has hinged rigid parts rather than soft, bending parts).

White Rabbit

Thank you for the reply. Yes, this is just simple, hinged joints, no flexible connections as such. Hopefully, I could maybe import my mesh into another application, and fix the grouping perhaps? Perhaps in Hexagon or Maya?

Richard Haseltine

You can group in DS - I suspect the problem will be too many groups, assuming you have used booleans to build it, rather than too few so it should just be a matter of selecting multiple groups and assigning them to a single group which is pretty easy.

White Rabbit

Okay, sounds good! I will give it a shot in DS. Yes, it was built using Booleans. Thanks again! :-)