I’ve gone though all my DT tuts and everything that I can find online. Organic rigging is easy to find information on and XSI seems to be built for it. But what I’ve been asked to do is rig up a transformer/battlemech type of robot. And frankly, I don’t have a clue where to start. I’ve done little to no rigging or animating in XSI. I’ve done some in Lightwave but I don’t suppose much of that will apply. Basic layout for a mech applies. There is a “head” that rotates 360 deg in the y axis with some cannons that move around on hinges. These are all done easily with rotation constraints and parented to the head. The head sits on a pelvis and the legs off that. The legs are like dog legs with the knee backwards to a human. The hip is like a ball socket to allow some rotation and the rest is pretty much a straight leg assembly. The foot will need some rotation also for walking on uneven ground.

Can anyone point me to a tut or an example? I’m more than a little overwhelmed looking at what is available. Rigid body dynamics has all the hinges and ball sockets but I think that is a bit overkill for something that should be this simple. Bones are another route that I looked into but have no idea how to link the bones to the hip, thigh, shin etc. Parenting and constraints are how I thought it should be accomplished but can find little information on how/if this would be the best route or how to apply it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Pose constrain your mech parts to the bones. Use bones, nulls, curves and what not in your rig. It’s not that different from an organic character, but you must plan ahead to make sure the way your geometry is built will not allow weird intersections or detachments which would be out of place for a robot.

Edit: I’ve build a couple of robots and the way I’ve approached this was by creating a concept first (hand-drawn or whatever you use to make concepts) and then model and create the rig both in the same time, adjusting the geometry or the rig, depending on each situation… it’s hard to put it on words.

The best advice I can give you is to start “playing” with this stuff and to not wait for tutorials or other people to tell you how to do it. You’ll learn a lot more this way and you’ll not risk to get accustomed to be told how to do stuff. Learn the hard way now and be much better later.

Start your own rig - hand drawn. Not only you’ll learn to create an entire rig from scratch, but you’ll want your bones to be positioned perfectly on geometry rotation pivots to avoid wobbling. For this, use snapping to point or centers and geometry dummies (cylinders, sheres or cubes that you’ll later delete) to move the joints where you need them - using ctrl+j.
Don’t forget about linking between rig parts, with expressions… a very powerful way to control your rig parts.
Take a look at this video I’ve made a long time ago lol. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWoCYhKSMws
I’ve started from a simple sphere and worked my way till the end with geometry modeling and rigging side by side. The rolling of the sphere is simulation till the point where (the robot “unpacks") it’s blended into pure animation and then blended back into simulation for the final roll over. For this I’ve used a sphere as an active rigid body to which my entire rig was parented (or constrained… I don’t remeber) and the ground plane as a passive rigid body.