Animating a pre-rigged character

[XminusOne]

So, I want to be a 3D animator and have a professionally rigged character I want to practise on (it's one of he Mass Animation characters, Riff, if anyone knows about it).

Sorry not familiar with Riff.

The problem I'm having is I don't know how to select the different 'animatable' aspects of the rig accurately. I've noticed you can turn off face selection, so you don't select the mesh, but I still don't see how you would select a certain aspect of the character to animate.

Without knowing how "Riff" has been rigged. There should be some nurbs curves(circles,spheres, etc.) that you select to translate,rotate, scale the rig. Make sure in the viewport, under "Show", you have Nurbs Curves ticked. If they're still not showing up, make sure they're not in a display layer and set to hidden. There's ways to rig characters so you don't see the Nurbs Curves(zooTriggered, do a search for it). But most of the free rigs out there, if not all of them, don't use that method. (I believe Primoboy uses this method, maybe a couple of others)

Also, should I be animating from the Perspective viewport? Or is there a way to animate looking through the 'shot camera' view and zoom in for detail if needed, without changing the cameras original settings?

Personally, I animate in the perspective view, but make sure I animate to the camera, if that makes sense. I don't usually use the shot cam to animate in, just to avoid any problems.

And the final question I have, whih may sound ridiculously simple but may also be related to the difficulty selecting rig parts/character controls is that I don't seem to be able to move parts of my model/character up and down and around in the scene. Just using the transform tool. I can rotate parts, but not move them! I ould be being really daft, but I'm pretty stuck here.

Sometimes character TD's lock off the Translate, Rotate, or Scale attributes so you can't key them or move them, personally I don't do that as I don't like setting up limits like that for animators(myself included:)), they tend to unlock them anyways. You can unlock things by selecting the control, and in the channel box go to "Channels" and find Editors>Channel Control, there you'll find the locked and hidden attributes, select them and move them over to the unlocked side(you'll understand when you do it) then you'll need to select the attributes in the channel box and right click on them and "unlock" them.

If you know a resource that might help me to learn these things and other similar animation selection problems, please let me know as I can't find out where it would be (rigging is normally about building a rig, but not much on actually working it!

Some resources not directly related to your issues but will still give you some good info.

http://www.keithlango.com (http://www.keithlango.com/)
http://www.jasonryananimation.com (http://www.jasonryananimation.com/)

I've got more, but don't have time right now. I'll edit it later with some more links.

If something in here is too vague or doesn't make sense to you, by all means ask me to clarify, and i'll do my best to help. Good luck and happy animating!!!

[rocketmouse]

Ok thanks a lot! I'll get on that now and try it out then get back to you.

Cheers.

[rocketmouse]

Ok, so I can select and rotate the different parts of the rig now. I can also move the character about and scale certain parts (they seem to have locked off others for quality control I reckon). But it all seems really fiddley. Is there anyway I can select certain parts of the character to animate without having to click around until I get lucky?

For example, I have some twizzly nob things on the top of the guitar, but they're a pain to select. And even the main body of the guitar has loads of different coloured lines circling it which are hard to determine from on another. Is there any way I can bring up a list of them and select/modify from a slider or something?

I've attached some images of the screen I'm looking at. The riffselection.jpg shows you the general rig and character, and the rifflocked.jpg shows you what I get when I try and unlock the elements that are locked. But are they that important? With regards to quality control/keeping the character on model easy.

Thanks again for your time and help!

Adam

[XminusOne]

You could open the outliner to see if that makes it easier to select things. But generally, with rigs, what you see there, is what you get. It's a typical setup from what I can tell. It also appears that it's referenced into the scene, DON'T "import from reference" or anything like that, they may make changes to the model or rig later and it would still need to be referenced into your scene for the updates to work properly. Sorry, there isn't really anything you can do. Looks like you're animating a shot for Mass Animation on Facebook, I just had a look last night myself, I might have to give it a go too. Looks like fun.

[rocketmouse]

ok no probs! Just wondered because in Max there's a way of viewing a list of selectable parts, so you can click to select them and ths make it a bit easier.

Yeah it's mass animation. You should have a crack and upload it then we can compare! I've only picked one shot so far. If I can get good enough control from it then I reckon I'll have a go at some more.

Thanks for your help anyway.

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