The site contains video lectures for sale that answer many FAQ's that pop up among animation students all over. After watching a few lectures on the basics of workflow and having started a few projects of my own I began to ask a familiar question to myself again and again. "Surely there is a more professional method to keeping a characters elbows still when interacting with a surface?" I'll be honest, my usual time frames for animating these scenes tend to push me for the cowards option of cutting out the legs. Thinking to myself that half the body is half the work... if anything its just half the learning. So I searched the site and found nothing in the archives close to what I wanted to achieve, so I decided to ask a friend in the industry what they would do. Her first answer was to do as I had been doing, though in all fairness someone of her skill level would make a far better job of it. Her second tip was, if I hadn't already to use the Kenny Roy site. But she also provided a link to a lecture which low and behold was on my exact question! Freaky huh?
The video showed a fairly simple method of adapting the current rig I use by adding a simple bone chain and parent constraining some locator nodes to other parts of the rig in order to have the rest of it orbit/pivot around the desired point, in this case the elbow. Now that might sound like nonsense to some, but having just spent a year learning to rig it is familiar territory I am more than happy to have worked through before. The most important lesson that I have learnt from this video however came from the following statement "Why are you doing so many shots of people behind a desk? You wont get those shots on the job, not if its your first one" lol he has a point. I wont animate anyone behind a desk anymore...Problem solved :)
You should also do jimfinlay.com's animtutor.
ReplyDelete