CGTalk - Rig controls confusion R8

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jimarse

01-09-2003, 12:54 AM

Hi all,

I posted the following at Post Forum, but I ain't getting much lovin' there, so I was hoping someone over here could enlighten me:

I'm a tad confused about how to use the controls in a rig like the Mime's to actually animate the character:

It seems to me that the basic idea for controling a bone/chain is that you want to have control over three things: The position (via the bone's root goal - eg Left Hand Controller), the tilting (via the bone's Tip Goal - child of LH Controller), and the global rotation (via the Up Vector-also child of LH Controller).

Ok. So, when it comes to animating the chain, there seem to be two distinct possibilities:

1) Keyframe the position AND rotation values of the Left Hand Controller, and not touch the Tip Goal or Up Vector at all. (This seems to be how the Mime animation was created).

2) Keyframe only the position values of the Left Hand Controller, and then tune the hand's tilt and rotation by setting position keyframes for the Tip Goal and Up vector.

I believe both would work fine, but feel that the second way is likely to give you more control (while probably taking more time and effort).
If anyone with more experiece than I (everyone) has any insight on this, or can tell me if one method is clearly preferred over the other by professional animators/studios (and why), I would be most happy.

Thanks awefully.

Per-Anders

01-09-2003, 02:25 AM

profesional animators want as much control as is possible, so often they resort to using FK, so no IK or SIK at all. really it's what works for you, some poeple prefer to just animate using sliders, others prefer to animate by hand controlling each and every component in a scene. so see what works for you, there's no right or wrong way of doing things, and i know it's kinda unsatisfactory as a response, but really it's the only good response that i can think of :)

try it out, it wont hurt :)

LucentDreams

01-09-2003, 03:00 AM

mdme Sadie is right, personally when I was fooling around with the mime waay back, I recorded position and rotation for hand controller and animated tip goal (not too much of the up vecotr but wasn't going crazy either)

My suggestion is do whatever you need to get the poses right, animation is all about the key poses. I find for myself now I no longer animate things on their own time frme where legs will have a key frame at say 4 and 12 while hand is 6 and 8. I make entire key poses,so I pose the character how I want him, and then go to the next key moment and pose him. then I watch how the computer does the inbetweens, especially with SIK, and see where I need to add more control. as well as animate my secondary motion, while they can be done all at once, its easier to get a nice flow to your animation if you do secondary action after recording the main action.

And for those who don't know what I'm refering to with main(primary) and secondary action, I suggest you read a book or two on classical animation before you consider 3D character animation

jimarse

01-09-2003, 02:34 PM

Thanks guys, that's actually very helpful. Plus Naam was kind enough to respond to my question on Post Forum and set me straight on the specifics of the Mime character rig so I'm all set to go!

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