Howdy. I been playing around trying to get a handle on rigging. it’s always been the one thing about 3D animation that i’ve never really been able to get the hang of, so i figured I’d make like i was learning how to swim and just jump in. The model, rig and animation were all done in a 24 hour time frame, so it’s pretty simple. I just figured i’d post it so people could spot stuff (as well as you can with a youtube quality video…) and rip it apart.
I know it sorta breaks down toward the last few frames… The feet were giving me issues, so i have to go back and mess around some more with the rig to see if i can keep that from happening. I think i may just re-do the arms and legs anyway, cause I couldn’t get IK working properly on the arms and the way i’ve got the legs now destroys my feet if i bend the toes too far. The arms in this are animated with FK. Rip it apart (well… what little is there)
The beginning looks good especially the swing of the arms but the jump needs to be an arc. It looks as if your character is being draged forward on wires once he leaves the ground.
Your character needs to do an arc like a ball does when you throw it. Also the direction of the character should point more upward forward to make it look more realistic.
Wow, a day or two later and the thread is 3 pages deep! There’s a lot of activity on these forums lately
Anyway, I keep making little adjustments to the rig, but i am gonna have to find a new foot solution. I’ve done another really really short clip thing here:
/* EDIT - I didn’t even touch his head, so i know it’s not bobbing and stuff like it should be */
The problem with a lot of the rigs and ideas i’ve tried thus far, this one included, is that i;m using half my keys for animating the poses and using the other half of the keys to fix the clipping-through-the-floor and other weird issues. This short second of animation took me a couple hours, and i dunno… i don’t really MIND doing all the extra crap, but it tends to cause problems when I go back to fine-tune the motions and I’ve got to re-key positions because the things i ‘fixed’ end up being broken again. 90% of the time it’s a foot issue, tho the hands occasionally need a tweak or two as well. I’m going to continue working on this, cause one of the reasons i’m working on this is to have a rock solid, yet very very simple-to-animate rig with as few control bones as possible.
@Musk, yeah, and i forgot to rotate his hips back after he jumps, so his spine is still bending forward and it should be more arched. I kinda lost my patience with the feet after about 20 frames, so the tail end of the motion is a lot less… good… . You can see them doing some weirdness on the ground if you look close… This newer version kinda fixes that a little, but not much.
I really like the character, this is the kind of stuff that would be good for a complete, tutorial. I mean simple modelling and good rigging + a little walkcycle that looks good.
I’m actually using this model in a short animated project thing for the sole purpose of learning animation. I have next to no 3D animation experience, but I’ve done some 2D stuff previously. Basically, the short is going to be two of these little guys who meet and interact in, essentially, a world made of cubes. I’m going to have them go through a couple different walks, runs, doing some jumping and climbing and stuff, interacting with each other physically (like dancing and fighting and stuff… not fully plotted that bit out…) as well as interacting with a few small objects which they will move around, pick up, throw and hopefully fight each other with.
When i get the thing done I plan on just releasing the full .blend file for it as well as the render, just to let the curious see how it was done. I dunno if a tutorial would be a good idea or not, as i don’t animate the way (I assume) 3D stuff is normally animated. I barely touch the IPO’s at all. I don’t animate walk ‘cycles’ in the traditional sense, i actually move the character around as i animate it and never re-use animation. It’s more like stop-motion in that sense. I will let people play around with the file and see how it all works and stuff, but i don’t think that’s the typical method of doing these things, so i wouldn’t really want to corrupt the innocent minds of the beginning CG animators out there by showing them a method that isn’t really the Industry Standard.
Of course, i could be totally wrong about how CG stuff is normally done, but most of the tutorials i have seen out there show ways of making looping animations and actions you can mix and stuff like that. I can see it being really useful for games and stuff, but for shorts and films I can’t say that idea really ever made much sense to me.
sounds like the idea i had for my little char, I’m at work and they don’t fancy people watching youtube, so I’ll check it out when I get home. I’ll follow this one…
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