A little demo showing a different approach to rigging the hips to allow for a natural swinging motion, inspired by a comment made by a member over on the 11 Second Club. I think this could potentially be quite useful for creating more natural walks and it’s not that tricky to add to a rig.
Victor Navone (Pixar) took some interest in this video and left some nice comments on it which made me very proud 🙂
A little demo of some tools I’ve written for quickly rigging spines, tails, floppy ears etc. These are part of my personal tool set that allows me to rig more effectively on jobs and then get to the fun stuff sooner – the animation! This was recorded in real time.
A little demo of how I block out a quick walk-cycle using custom mirroring tools I’ve written for Maya. Generally I don’t animate most things in such a layered fashion, but for walks and runs I find it’s a nice way to work quickly.
The main tools I’m using here are scripts that allow me to mirror different kinds of controllers, from IK feet and hands to Spine controllers and FK arms. These will work with pretty much any rig and don’t need any set-up. During the blocking section I’m also using a tool that keys the same pose on the first and last frame of the cycle so I don’t have to play that frame when animating (which would look like a hitch since it’s the same pose as frame 1). That tool is based on the ‘set prompt’ tool in Maya but automatically figures out how long the loop is so I don’t have to type it in each time (I think I’m actually using it too quickly to see clearly in the video but you’ll see it flash up now and then 🙂 )
The other thing you’ll see me doing from time to time is favoring keys using my own version of the classic ‘TweenMachine’ tool (the arrow buttons on my shelf). I wrote a TweenMachine tool for C4D a while back (available on my website) and found I preferred just having some buttons to nudge poses back and forward rather than a slider so I wrote one for Maya too.
At the end of the video I convert the walk-in-place to one that translates in world space using another tool I created called ‘bh_snapToWorldspace’.
This video is sped up 6x and it real time this was about 25 minutes in total. Hope you find it interesting!
The Sheldon rig is from the fantastic iAnimate online animation school.
A little trick that can allow you access to polygon selections on meshes driven by Alembic caches in Cinema4D. I also demonstrate how to bake the animation down to Point Cache tags which can help work around bugs with Net rendering Alembic in Cinema R14.042.