Hello HypefroActive fans and welcome to another exciting edition of Animations on HypefroActive. The year is 2015 and the month is march. The month where we march on to Greatness. Ok, so as usual i'm on my grind animating and i did mention that i'll be doing a fight anime but i kinda slowed down to something a bit different probably to calm my nerves and relieve me of the anxiety. So what am i doing? I'm doing a dialogue animation. Just one character talking away and making gestures. I've been practicing alot of things lately including cooking up a formula for me to work with so it's time to test these things out.
As usual, i'm going low poly and i'm using the 3dsmax CAT rig, the "base human". It's not a very flexible rig to animate with especially at the pelvis region, so that part i have to manage so as to get close to the required results but the upside to this is that animating the fingers wont be much of a problem because it comes with a preset that you can save already created animations and load as well. Matter of fact, the major reason i use the CAT rig is not just because it's easy to set up but also because, of the Hand presets. And did i also mention that you can manually animate the fingers to give various feels like someone holding on to a wall, with the fingers strained at the tips to show that strength is been transferred there to hold the person up, or in holding a vase realistically such that there is this feeling of firm grip around the fingers. So, when it comes to hand animations, i'ld say the CAT rig is not doing a bad job at all. As a matter of fact most things about the rig are ok for animating even if it's primary function or better function would be to transfer motion data from another rig to it.
In this shot i have come to agree that YES, rig does matter a lot depending on what you hope to achieve with it. And that doesn't mean if you have the best setup rig in the world of anime your animations would be any better, as this is not always true. The most important thing here would be knowing how to animate at all then the issue of rig would later come into place. And that's when you can say, "oh if i had a better rig, this animation would have come out better than it is now". Another thing that would further help would be to understand your rig, know it's limitations and know when exactly to use what "within the rig" for instance when to switch from ik to fk while animating and stuffs like that.
Ok, back to my anime shot, i started out with this Jeff Lew super hero intro that he used in one of his training dvds. While he was animating it looked simple but i tell you, if you don't understand exactly how the various parts of the human body interacts with each other, animating just that piece of about forty frames might not happen. I once tried it a looooong time ago and it looked ok after many failures and back then, even as i knew that something was missing or "a lot of things were missing" and my friends smiled and applauded and if you ask me back then, it really did look cool. Now fast forwarding into the near future and Months later, precisely right now, and i'm looking at it and comparing it to this other new one and i feel like strangling myself. Like seriously... WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME back then? I guess knowing that there was this thing that i used to do in this particular way back in the day, will not work now in 2015, so i have to improvise, make and apply the necessary changes.
Ok, That's all for today. Until we meet again, keep animating, keep improving on previous works and with some consistency and focus, you'll get there.
P.S: I intend finishing this anime before next week runs out or maybe less. Then we'll see where we go from there.
