Hey guys, so here is the little video I put together for my first character animation. It’s rough, but by the end of this project, I definitely improved (you can even see it from beginning to end).
What an incredible rig, and absolutely free! Definitely sparks an interest to learn character animation more. There is another free rig (‘Rain’ from same site and artists) that would be perfect to play off Vincent…
The most difficult thing is to understand the speed at which humans move. The speed of little movements. How fast they start up and stop. Ease-in and out. The minutia details of human ticks…flicks of the eye…mouth movements. The relationship (butterfly effect) of a movement somewhere on the body that should influence another part of the body). And as this is a stylized character, it’s OK to go a little overboard with certain moves, but I didn’t want to too much. Finding a balance.
I wonder if I can import Miximo animation into Vincent easily…
I really wanted to have Vincent take a drink, but either doing mantaflow sim here or faking it in a glass he picks up (by parenting) was beyond this exercise.
Vincent Design: Matias Mendiola
Vincent Model and Shading: Andy Goralczyk
Vincent Rig: Juan Pablo Bouza
Vincent Animation: ME!
Music clip from Pink Floyd’s Animals (I hope it’s short enough not to get DMCd).
A bar scene allows me to have a character sit down and I can practice animation and keyframe interpolation without having to learn a walk cycle…yet.
I’m going to add Rain in the next test with Vincent…she’s a great rig too. I really need to learn keyframe parenting…so I can have them pick up a drink and put it down. Right now, I’m faking it with keyframing the alpha on two different version. It’s odd. For some reason keyframing from parented to not parented was confusing to me.
EDIT: I was having trouble switching from IK to FK before…in my first animation here. Because I wasn’t even using the side-bar Blenrig puppet. In the tutorial video he was using an older version, but I finally found the IK/FK settings and hinge setup.
What do you mean with keyframe parenting? Do you mean keyframe drivers? In that case it’s pretty easy, just a few buttons. So far I’ve only done facial animations and sculpted the head so I can’t give any advice on rigging.
Parenting as in: Picking up an object. I want to not have the object parented to the hand bone, and then when the character reaches for the object it gets parented to the hand via a key.
I tried, and I can’t seem to key the parent action. Maybe I’m going about it wrong.
