Rigging Techniques and How important is your Rig Setup to your Animations.

Hello HypefroActive Fans and welcome to another edition of Animations on HypefroActive. Alright i'm stil on my character from the last edition and we are making progress.

As at today, i'm done with rigging and on to skinning. Also i take my time doing researches on the kind of dance moves that i'ld want to Animate as well as song for the shot. This Animated Dance video will come in two versions, the first will be short with a known popular song not yet determined at the moment but it would either be a Michael Jackson, An old school or a Nigerian song. But which ever way it goes the moves have to match any of these songs. I'm hoping it will be very entertaining and better than anything that i've ever done and the first would be short and available to all social media platforms while the longer version would be exclusive only to YouTubers.

Now as at the last time i posted an article on here, i just began working on this project and was in the rigging process where i was talking about the manual, automatic but i choose to use the composition of both of them. A lot of people see animation shots and ask how was this rigged or what software was used to achieve this? And when i look at issues such as this, it makes me wonder why people should bother themselves about type of rigs rather than how to Animate. But again, these people have a point like i discussed here http://reidchannel.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-to-animate-dance-animation-from.html especially if you are doing a dance Animation and there is this move where the hips have to go wild swinging wildly and fluidly, otherwise other than things like this about any kind of rig would do and the outcome for the animation finesse would depend a great deal on your Animation skill. It must be noted however that the more bones and controls you rig your model with, the more work you'll do.

For this Animation, i would have loved to customize the fingers so that they are been controlled by sliders via Attribute holders. An Attribute holder is a modifier in 3dsmax that helps in storing parameters added to a control object like the shape controller. But i couldnt do that because i'm hoping to use this same "everything" if possible for the next Animation shot. Stil i miss customizing the hands because it makes everything easy while animating because all i have  to do is pull down or push up a slider to get the desired pose i want. The downside is that the pose is on the average, that is a little bit close or away from what you EXACTLY want but in all it works. And now that the fingers are in the Manual setup, though i'll get precisely what i want in terms of posing the fingers, the thing is i'll have to rotate every finger bone link one after the other to get what i want. There are three bones in every finger, thus i have to rotate every bone individually and excruciatingly. Now that's not cool, but i get what i want so i'll let that pass, Manual i go.

Right now i'm in the skinning process and i also have to make up my mind on the ingredients for the shot as discussed above. So stick around as I'll be updating this post.

Ok, so i'm done with the skinning and texturing and i have something that looks like this. Ready to animate but i'm putting final touches to the character plus i still have to create the morph targets. when i'm done with this i dont think i'll be rendering this shot, at least not now. I'll probably setup the scene filling it with whatever i think it's neccesary but would want to keep it low poly as usual so dont expect much in terms of beautifying the scene. Ok, it's nice hanging with you guys and i'll probably update again with a pose or something or maybe create a new post when i begin animating. So i'll see you guys pretty soon. Keep the dream alive and keep Animating.