Creature Tests

After a very interesting visit by Double Negative today and a spot of lunch it was time to get back into animation and rig workings day 2. After countless tests yesterday to see where the rig could possibly go wrong and break, and if keying for animation works properly, the only way to really know for sure if the rig will work is to put it to the test. So this afternoon I've been putting our little creature into many poses and just went from there.

Below is a short test of the creature jumping, made in about 2hours with tweaks, but from this I've learnt the possibilities and restrictions of the tail's movement. Currently there's some nifty controls for complete tail movement horizontally and vertically and individual controls. Animating with just Tail_Curl (vertical rotation) was great for the starting anticipation. However to gain a real sense of weight from his tail (because it does look rather heavy) I needed the extra controls to move tail parts individually. So when it came to the end of the jump, for his heavy land, the tail naturally needed to stay relatively low after the initial impact. When it came to use these individual controls, they wouldn't key and keep the animation in place. Because I used the Tail_Curl control, I thought the individual controls weren't set up to work in conjunction with it, so I opened up a new scene and tested the tail. For some reason, probably because certain rigging connections weren't linked properly with each other I needed rigging help from Matt B our teams modelling, rigging and now some dynamics extraordinaire, to overcome this problem.

With this new scene it seems, for now, the easy way to overcome this is through creating a bunch set driven keys. So here's the process:

First we select a tail control, then in the Channel Box Edit -> Add Attribute

Name it Tail_Curl and a Minimum and Maximum Value of -10 and 10

Then we add a Set Driven Key (Always Load Driver and Driven for each new control)

Set the Neutral Pose first so Rotate Z - 0 and Tail Curl - 0

Set the Minimum value in Tail Curl as -10 and Rotate Z as (in my case) -70 for the amount of rotation

Do the same for the Maximum value so Tail Curl as 10 and Rotate Z as 70

Done and Repeat for the others

Restrictions are also evident in the hands/fingers and movement in the toes but from an anatomical perspective movements I'm thinking of wouldn't be possible. However, for that something more in the animation it would be great to have individual finger rotations for use in certain poses and for more freedom in movement/walk cycles/hand gestures just to give something a little more into an animation.

Anyway here's the first playblast I got, the first rough test:

Second with tweaks:

I also wanted the arms to land at different times and places to get the desired result, and for a character as described as a bit 'dopey' you want a bit of this to show a bit of character, so below is a video for both arms landing just a frame apart, which looks too quick and too thought out and too 'practised' a jump. Whereas putting the arms out by a few frames and exaggerating movement you can get that bit of dopiness across, like he is still learning to jump. And in the final tweak above I got what I was looking for. As noted above though, through the limitations of the rig I couldn't get the desired movement at the end for the tail, so at the minute it feels a bit weightless.