Practice 1

Practised a little animation using three characters I modelled and rigged for an animation assignment last year. I made them dance to a little music, tested out some facial expressions and did a short scene set to dialogue from an old radio play called ‘The Avengers’.

I’m happy with the outcome, though the animation is rough and would benefit from some tweaking and refining.

During the process of animation I discovered several limits and flaws in my model’s rig set up.
(A rig is a skeleton built into a 3D model with handles and controllers animators can operate to move the model around into different poses)
(Without a rig a 3D model is like a statue, static and unmoving)

Here you can see the ‘bones’ of 2 of my character’s rig.

• ankle set up made it difficult to position the feet without distorting them (similar problem in the shoulders, a lot of mesh twisting and distortion)
• no way to rotate the arms or the hands (whoopsy)
• rigging and animating fabric, such as the girls dress, is very difficult. Learning how to create cloth simulations to automatically animate clothes would be brilliant.

In order to practice animation I’ll need to also improve my modelling and rigging skills so I can create characters that are fully functional, can do a larger range of movement and are hopefully easier to animate haha

Alternatively, I can explore the internet and track down some nice rigged characters I can use to jump into practising animation. Working with other people’s models will also hopefully give me a feel for what a quality rig needs, and insight into different rigging techniques which will help me to create better rigs in the future.