The Valve.Biped skeleton in Blender

[Payne☣]

In Blender, why does the Valve.biped armature look so different then ones you make from scratch in Blender? I.E From scratch the bones look like pyramids with sphere joints. On Valve.biped they look like tiny barbells in edit mode connected with dotted lines from each sphere in the direction of the children or parent bones.

[Payne☣]

Its actually frustrating, not easier, because the blender tutorials dont look like that so tuts like setting up IK controls to an armature to make new animations aren't working right.

I'm pretty stumped how to move forward here and build a IK control rig on valve.biped in Blender. Figuring out why the bones look different is a step in right direction to figure this out.

[xdshot]

Different bones axis direction convention created in different software. Also to note, source reference bones contain only position and axis directions information, no lengths.

[Payne☣]

Not sure what length is yet.

I found this video that explain a bit whats going on also.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YszQoj_2M4

[Payne☣]

Appears to be nearly impossible to setup IK controls on the valve.biped reference without these bone lengths. The bone tail direction is also facing the wrong direction.

[xdshot]

Make separate "octahedral" skeleton setup, just right into same armature. Parent valvebiped skeleton via constaint into that octahedral setup. Do stuff.

[xdshot]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1407133111 gives you an idea. Source files are inside vpk.

[Payne☣]

Sounds like a hack to me but I did look at your .blend. Apparently the old XSI modtool 6 has a Valve.biped plugin to create a fully IK rigged skeleton for Hl2 characters. But XSI modtool is obsolete, likely buggy, unsupported, and doesn't have a free beer type of licence. Probably not worth investing time into it.

[xdshot]

IK rig for animating. Valvebiped's motion is exported. Studiomdl automatically strips unneeded bones (ik heirarchy)

[xdshot]

Solution inside vpk is an example. To get idea how it does look.

[Payne☣]

Your blend was very complicated, I couldn't understand. But I tried some things and it never really worked right , it just seemed like hack. But thanks you for your feedback.

I've decided to completly remake the armature and forget the possibility of re-using any stock animations. There is no other way. The reference valve.biped skeleton is unusable to add new animations onto.

[Payne☣]

Another issue I found. When trying to copy flip poses. Blender doesn't understand Valve's naming convention for bones. Like "ValveBiped.Bip01_L_foot". New rig has to use a recognizable naming convention like foot.R and foot.L.