Is there a quick way to animate chracters? (like Blendshapes)

#1

The question may sound strange (and\or stupid) cos’ of course it’s mostly a matter of experience and so on. But I was wondering is there any means of realy speeding up a process of animating a simple ik\fk character? In my case, usually a significant amount of time is spent to make a simple move from “sitting and resting” pose to, for example “standing and shouting Oh My God!” pose with character’s hands on its head. Is there a way of making a kind of blendshapes but for the skeleton’s controls like “T-pose”, “Oh my god!-pose”, “Hey look!-Pose” and so on and switch between them during the animation? Just like I do with blendshapes and have the ability to edit their F-curves. That would make my life a lot easier… Thanks in advance!

#2

Take a look on creativeCrash for pose managers. I don’t know of any off the top of my head but there should be quite a few out there.
Failing that, write your own if you can.

#3

The only way to get what you want, is to use driven keys on your characters controls. Create custom attributes (“blendshapes”) on one of your main controllers, set your poses (with the help of a pose manager, as suggested), and use your created attributes to drive the poses with driven keys (0 = default pose, 1 = custom pose).
The nice thing is, you can layer as many driven keys on top of each other and it will work like blendshapes in the end, and you can drive a “sequence” of poses with one attribute. The bad thing is that hundreds of blendshapes can get quite messy in the graph editor and in the hypershade window

#4

You could also look at character sets, clips and trax, where you can blend between different clips. Normally the clips would be animated, but there is nothing to stop you using static poses.

Having said that, I 2nd the suggestion of finding a good pose manager script. I use the zooAnimStore which lets you store both poses and animations. There’s also poseMan and poseLib on creativecrash.

David

#5

I love you guys! Gone testing!

#6

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