Musha Tests Commence

Start of the week and I'm on more testing of the rigs. Got hold of the hunter rig and after some poses and a quick play with the joints and many, many controls that get bundled in with the auto-rigger, there are some issues. The weighting is the main issue, with parts of geometry following stuff it shouldn't and a moustache that floats about when rotating his head. The other main problem is with the feet, because the control to rotate and translate is at the end of the foot there is no way to make a proper walk/run cycle through not being able to rotate the foot upwards on contact with the floor. Other than that it seems okay to use.

I have another test I've been working on this late afternoon, after working out a small scale problem with the creature rig with Matt B, where his eyes would not scale with the rest of his body and rig. After this quick temp fix, I followed some of the animatic and looked at the poses the creature had been put into and posed the 3-D rig to match. There is a small issue with the way he is drawn and the way he can be put, mainly due to not being able to squish much and his huge front which implies a huge weight so can't do some of the drawn poses. But when we get to these scenes the poses and actions will be sorted out as we go if the animators encounter problems.

Below is a test for a part of scene mushroom where I used the bouncy mushrooms from the tests done last term and the creature rig:

I based the jump on from what I remembered doing this test last term with the squirrelly rig and from the jump test I made on Friday. I like the way this quick test has turned out and the movement is flowing nice, however, he flows too much and doesn't have much of a sense of weight, too much like a small light squirrel. So I went back and tried to add more emphasis on his land on the mushroom, therefore implying more weight by making the creature lean down more into the mushroom , holding the contact for longer also and more of a push off the mushroom. Here the movement seems too jolty and stiff for the take-off jump:

Below I have added in the bounce of the mushroom and a few slight tweaks to give some refined movement, as a could-be shot and side-on. This was a nice little test to do, and have more ideas on how to improve and make the creature move much better for next time. Because I animated the creature bouncing on a still mushroom, it made it far harder to add anything other than a little more hip movement, and I couldn't get him to sink into the mushroom emphasizing him further giving the illusion of more weight. For the next test I need to make the back legs come down a few frames later than the front, leaning down more into the mushroom, more anticipation for the jump off the mushroom and the timing of the mushroom bounce altered slightly. But so far so good, and I do like how this animation flows, but to get his character across I need to make the above changes/keep in mind for the next test.