What do I want to achieve: To be able to do poses and simple animations (a guy walking, sitting and standing etc) using my character models with a full rigify rig
What did I try: I can pose limbs and such – I also know how to save poses in the pose manager / asset manager
What went wrong: It takes me FOREVER for achieve a pose – a simple sitting pose probably took an hour last night
What do I need: Recommendations for good video tutorials about USING (not installing) the rigify rig to achieve simple animations and poses that I can use in my videos
Tutorials for animation don’t really depend on the rig. There are plenty of tutorials out there for walk cycles, which is maybe something I’d recommend searching for. While you do need to know what each bone does, that’s the first 0.5% of animation. If you need to know what your bones do, spend a day playing with them. A day isn’t long.
And, animation takes a long time. You shouldn’t expect hand-animation to go fast. Use a video recording of yourself to judge timing, then pose key frames, then make the between-frames of those key frames work. Not keyframes, key frames, frames that matter the most to your audience’s perception.
There are Blender-specific things that won’t be dealt with in animation tutorials. Use either tweak (click and drag, likely with a pen) to move bones, or use g/r/x hotkeys. Don’t use the gizmo, that’s brutal time wastage. Heaven forbid, don’t enter numbers in the transform fields. Learn how to orient your view, with numpad, but also with ctrl numpad on a selection. Learn and use pivot points, orientations, cursor placement. Learn and use tool options like affect only: locations; use that to move, say, an IK target close to a cursor. Learn how to move breakdown keyframes along the timeline to create acceleration or deceleration.
And, focus on the thing you’re animating and ignore irrelevancies. Make your room then make your walk in it. Don’t go switching between editing the room and editing the walk. You shouldn’t even be looking at anything that doesn’t interact with what you’re posing. Posing should be the last step in what you do: everything else should be finalized.
