I’m probably not the right person to recommend one, I learned rigging way too long ago and am not up to date with learning ressources. Someone else could help maybe?
If you want a complex rig quickly, the rigify tool that comes with Blender could probably help.
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However, it is possible to do better even with what you currently have, even with everything in IK. It’s a matter of knowing the right techniques and tools. The IK handle of the wrist should follow a smooth, curved trajectory. It could be difficult to do it purely by eye, but it’s a lot easier if you know about the motion paths tool. It allows you to see the movement of any bone or object as a curve in the scene, so you can see if it’s a smooth trajectory or a chaotic zigzag.
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Something else that can help, especially if you are trying to replicate a real video, is to literally copy the movement. At the very least, it’s a good training exercise.
You start by pausing the reference video at the starting point of your animation, then copy the pose as exactly as possible. Then, you move the video forward a few frames and copy the pose again. You keep going, copying the pose from the video every few frames until you have the whole animation. No need to have a constant number of frames between each pose, you can pick the key moments, as long as you follow the same number of frames as the reference. This will give you the exact timing of the reference, almost like a manual mocap.
Once that is complete, you clean your animation, making sure the transitions between each pose are smooth, without clipping and the feet don’t slide on the ground.
I’m very sorry to bother you, but may I ask just one more thing? If you answer, I would be truly happy.
You said that I should learn workflows and terminology. I think you meant that my works don’t show traces of applying the definition of terms or using workflows. How does that become apparent in my works?
I hope that someday I can have keen observation skills like you.
Well, I think the Animator’s survival kit is going to answer a lot of your questions,
bouncing ball is a crucial point because it’s a basic element you find in nearly all type of motion. In a walk the head and waist are doing a bouncing like motion but a bit un-synchronized, then you have the arms that get into the mix and a lot of details that makes it quickly overwhelming.
You’ll see in the book that a very huge chapter is about the walk, and it’s very interesting how many variations he can create from such a mundane action.
Williams explains how it’s possible to bend reality while staying believable and also how to give some character to that walk. Obviously someone angry will walk differently that someone depressed… Obviously it’s easy to understand the differences on the surface level, but much harder to apply them in a particular animation.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to build a library of motion right now since you don’t know yet the bare bones of animation. Kind of buying every possible ingredients and accessories to cook before learning it…
For now I suggest you don’t bother doing animation, but try to find learning material about it even online or youtube stuff and start to see what it is to think like an animator. Then once you have a course or a book start practicing and eventually you’ll go back to what you’re doing now !
Meaning send my your character .blend file and I’ll look over the character’s rig. There are probably ways to improve it to make it easier to work with. For example, you are using IK on the arms. You can use FK instead by making a few changes with it probably. Any decent rig will have FK and IK arms and legs and you can switch between the two as needed.
Your mesh is also twisting - right shoulder and right hip/thigh areas -
Looked at the file and I hate to be blunt about it, but it needs a ton of work!!!
I think it would actually be best to start over, or at least delete half of everything and start over.
Normally, when creating a character, you want it to be aligned with the 3D world’s axis. The x-axis is left to right and the y-axis is front to back. Here’s a top view of your character:
So I don’t know what you want to do. You seem pretty interested in learning animation, so go find a rigged character and learn animation.
If you want to create your own characters, then you need to learn modelling characters. Learning rigging is a good skill, but it takes time and auto rigging tools are available.
I’ve made a decision. How can I find a rigged character? Ideally, I’d like one with a good balance of FK and IK. Just to be clear, I’m not asking you to find one for me—I can’t owe you a favor like that. What I mean is, I’d really appreciate it if you could tell me how to find rigged characters.
Lastly, I have two questions that I’d like to ask. If you don’t want to answer them, that’s totally fine.
How inefficient is the rigging of the character I gave you?
Do you think spending $90 on a rigging course from a trustworthy veteran is worth it, or are free YouTube tutorials enough?
Above all, thank you so much for your concern. You’re a really kind person, and I won’t forget your kindness. Thank you so much.
If you are really serious about animation and you can afford it, rigging and animation are the parts of the 3D pipeline I would say are the most worth it to learn from a professional.
The free info is harder to find on those topics and they benefit greatly from a teacher’s supervision (if that is included). It’s not like modeling where it’s immediately obvious if the result looks good.
I think I would follow @Richard_Culver advice on the Animation Fundamentals Rigs. Those rigs were created for a beginner’s animation course, so they are probably easy to use. The Animation Fundamentals training course requires a subscription to the blender cloud/studio at about 11.50 euros. It’s probably worth every bit of that if you sign up for a month and do the whole course in 1 month’s time. (btw - the course starts with a bouncing ball)
I was looking over that link and those files were published in 2019, so you would probably have to use a lower version of blender to use them. You would probably want to use blender 3.6 with those rigs. I use blender 3.6 all the time for animation because my computer is really slow and 3.6 works good on it.
It’s about as good as the first rig I created when I started learning this stuff. My animations weren’t good and I blamed it on the rigging, so I started learning rigging. The rig you have is the bare minimum of what is needed for animation. Working with the bare minimum is tough work. Get a better rig.
I think $90 on a rigging course is a bit much. The Animation Fundamentals training course is 11.50 a month.
Youtube videos are a mixed bag ranging from very good to very bad.
Rigging and animation are both important for good animations. I once made a clown juggling balls on a unicycle animation. In order to do that I had to rig the unicycle. Here is how I created it…
