Does anyone animate without sliders?

[Dave_Hingley]

I usually set fingers up to a slider In fact i set most things up to a slider. I once animated a newspaper being thrown onto a table so i plut the folding of the paper on one slider and the curl of a paper on another. Another one that was fun was a beetle. For that i had one spline object that as i rotated it the carapace opened and the wings unfolded. I had a slider controlling wing speed linked to a plsine controller that allowed me to animate very rapid wing movement without having to set any sub frame keys (in fact i think i only set one key to start the wings off)

it really depends on what you are planning to animate and how much time you have. if you think you will be doing a lot of finger animation then it is worth putting them on a slider or some kind of master control. Its easier to keep track of all the keys. because one finger s animation is reduced to one track

Of course you might be worried that you might not get the full controll you want. In which case what i do is place extra nodes on the finger joint to add aditional offsets to the rotations
Another trick you can try is to set the rotations to be controlled by a game controller and 'record' the animation. However i think if you decide to do that you should be prepared to edit the animation after because it will make a keyframe per frame.

Finally you could have a single object at the root of the finger copying its rotation Down the bone chain

[Scott Ayers]

I mostly use C4D. And one of the things about using sliders that's annoying is that when you apply an xpression to the joints. You can't move them by hand unless you turn off the xpression first.
It's a lot of extra redundant keying. And it seems kind of old fashioned to me.

One of the really nice things I like about Poser is that the slider controls don't lock the joints out from the user's mouse control. And you can switch between using the dials or selecting them by hand with your mouse and move them.
It's really nice to have that abilty to be able to do both at the same time. It makes animating much faster and more enjoyable for me.
It's especially handy for things with lots of parts like hands.
I've never understood why these professional programs lock out your mouse as an option if you choose to use sliders.
Unless it's there and I just don't know about it.

[coop]

I'm partial to the 'anzovin' style of hand rigging where the top node of each finger has full rotational control, and the next two joints are attributes.

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