How much "corrective" Point Animation do you guys do?

[JoelMayer]

Been watching some Toon Boom stuff a guy i know posted and remembered my days animating rigs like that. There you'd basically slap envelope deformers onto everything and "re-sculpt" your drawings according to an action.

I find with Moho, i'm never able to create a rig where i don't have to go through it again in the end doing a "clean-up" pass and animating the vector shapes themselves to mold the thing into the look i want, cover up awkward edges, etc.

Just was curious if this is a common occurence with you guys as well

(this is why i'd love a completely consolidated timeline where i have to move only one key for the whole shabang)

[slowtiger]

This really depends on how much work you put into constructing and rigging your character, and how complex that character is and how complex the animation.

I often have to create one-off characters for short projects which I know I will never use again, so I work quick and dirty and construct tem just good enough, knowing that I'll need them for just some seconds. Of course those may break at some point so I have to correct with point animation, but that's no big deal.

OTOH I worked for studios doing episodes, where the characters were provided, and having to correct those again and again in such common movements as a walk or blink was a PITA. Anything in that field should be tested and refined much more thoroughly. With Moho's recent abilities it is entirely posible to do 95% of all animation without going into correcting points, if rigging was done right.

[Greenlaw]

That's a good question.

I rarely need to apply corrective point animation because this is typically built into the rig via Smart Bones. But I build this into the rig only when the rig meant to be reused in multiple shots or throughout an entire series. Building point correction into a rig takes extra time, but it can really pay off during animation, especially across many shots.

Occasionally, I'll take the magnet tool and adjust a mouth shape to give it more character or variation, but this isn't the same as a 'correction'. I might apply some major warping and transforms to a character or part of the character when I have an unusual camera angle. Again, this is not so much a correction as creating a shot-specific variation of a rig.

I'm more likely to do corrective point animation when the shot is a one-off because, in this situation, it doesn't make sense to build that into a rig when the rig probably won't be reused in another shot or at least not animated the same way in another shot.

I guess it depends on how you define 'corrective' point animation. For me, it's any recurring problem in a rig that I have to keep fixing. This could be a weird deformation in an arm or leg bend, or the head taking an odd shape when it's posed in a common angle. This sort of correction should definitely be built into a rig.

[Daxel]

I would say there are two main reasons to do extra point animation: corrective point animation and extra point animation.

Corrective point animation should be avoided and replaced with point animation inside smartactions for any normal or frecuent movement that occur in normal or frecuent positions / perspectives. Otherwise, its perfectly fine to use corrective point animation like others said. Sometimes, there are rigging techniques that fix some things without the need for point animation. A good example is non-destructive bone scaling (tutorial by Mult Rush): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcwTco4ZlQ8&t=1s. Without this technique, you will need to do a lot of corrective point animation in the elbows or knees when you scale the arms or the legs, because your smartbones were designed with a different bone scale in mind. And that kind of corrective point animation, the one that you need to fix differently for each frame, it's obviously the worst.

Extra point animation is actually the reason I also want better timeline management. It's super easy to level up your animations with just the magnet tool and point animation and it greatly reduces the cutout feeling of the product to a level it can feel like frame by frame animation. Smearing, clothes secondary animation, hair, breathing, some facial expressions and things like that.
For timeline management, I use a second monitor just for the timeline panel so I can show many layers in it.

[JoelMayer]

Yee... personally no matter how many smartactions i do i always end up having to do slight adjustments in an animation to make things look really nice. But i'm also the first to admit that i'm not the greatest rigger and i also never strive for much automation because i feel it limits me in animation and often times leads to more headaches than being helpful.

With getting down to a point level i find it much easier to do stuff that looks less "cut-out-y". I use quite a bit of Vitruvian bones though and now started using fbf layers for hands and eyes etc. to be able to draw them on the fly instead of spending years rigging and never getting to animate (i'm impatient).

Since i animate mostly in step mode and then inbetween (either through tweening or by hand) i don't run into TOO many problems mostly but yea i think animating or correcting points is still Moho's strongest point (heh) so i hope it'll get easier to adjust timings etc. on the fly in the future.