Character WIP. Full range of motion with skeletal animation.

[Canny Valley]

Animation test at FireFront
Animation test at 4mations

This is a character I'm working on. It also represents my first attempt at using Anime Studio. If I can get it polished and working well enough, I'd like to start selling characters in C*P someday.

This started as an experiment to see if full range of motion were possible using bones. By "full range of motion," I mean you can rotate any limb 360 degrees. While some limb-breaking poses may look unnatural or painful, the point is that the black line around the character will never break.

I was inspired to do this the first time I tried to raise Winsor's arms above his head and saw that big chunk of shirt covering up all his torso outlines.

I haven't gotten very far in the tutorials yet, so everything you see here was done with the drawing tools and a simple skeleton rig. I still have a lot to learn, (my head turn is crap, for instance,) this is just a proof-of-concept and a test of the basic character construction.

Any comments and criticism would be greatly appreciated. Especially suggestions on what to add or improve. Remember, if you don't tell me what I did wrong, I won't learn anything!

[mkelley]

Not bad, not bad at all.

Since all of my character work is in 3/4 I have an affinity for this approach. One thing I might recommend (particularly since you are looking to sell this rig) is to enable the back arm to reach around in front (you can do this in a variety of ways but my favorite so far is to create another layer with the upper arm filled invisibly and then just use an action to raise this layer above the body). You can achieve some very nice poses with this ability.

Also, from an expressive standpoint, it's really good if you keep the eyebrows clear of obstruction -- here the hair kind of works against them. You'd be amazed at how much expression you can get with just the brows (and combined with lids and mouth -- absolutely amazing!). Once again, looking to sell you want to make it as "plussed" as possible.

[Canny Valley]

Duly noted. Thanks, mkelly.

I'll take a look at some other toons and see what I can do... probably I just need to make the forehead bigger. I always draw the forehead too short, I have no idea why.

Oh, and in the demonstration video, the hand and wrist pass in front of the torso at about the 2 second mark. I accomplished this by simply changing the order of the layers, and then changing it back again. Is that considered too complicated for most users to figure out? A duplicate arm seems kinda ridiculous to achieve that effect...

Edit: OH! Upper arm! Yeah, I get you.

Like handing a glass of wine to the camera, or something?

But, yeah... same principle applies. Why add invisible body parts when you can just re-order the layers? Is toggling visibility perceived as easier?

[mkelley]

Sorry, I didn't look at your video. I was merely commenting based on my own experience.

In order to get the upstage forearm to pass in front of the body you can't just change the order of the arm *unless* your arm is in more than one piece (mine aren't -- all my arms and legs are one piece with Vern's rig to properly bend them and maintain volume properly as if muscles are bulging). I didn't look at your video so I don't know if you are using a two piece arm.

If your upstage arm is in one piece and you change the order the upper arm will suddenly appear in front of the body -- a no-no. So I use a dupe layer of that arm but with the upper part invisible (and this thus allows someone to reach behind them or in front of them by simply changing the layer order of this piece). Because the arm is duped it will bend exactly the same way (bulge the same way) although the upper part of it is invisible (if I did it any other way the bend would not match up).

But if you're doing it differently no huhu -- different strokes work for different folks.

[mkelley]

Uh, tried to look at the video but it's *way* too fast to be able to tell anything constructive. If you want more educated comments you might want to render that out at quarter (or even eighth) speed to slow movements up for folks to be able to see what's happening.

Still, I can't see how simply changing the order of your upstage arm is doing what I suggested -- perhaps if you slow your video down I'll see how you're doing it.

[Canny Valley]

Ugh, I see your point. Sorry about that. At the time it seemed like it nicely showcased the rotating limbs, but that's because I'm used to looking at it frame by frame in the timeline. >.<

I'll work on a better animation and have one ready soon.

*Edit* Oh, NOW I see what you're saying. Use two parts to the upper arm! I thought you were talking about the wrist, then I thought you were talking about the whole arm including the shoulder. You just want her to be able to cross her upper arms over the chest, more or less. I get it now.

I'll see what I can do. You're right, a duplicate half of the upper arm is the way to go.

[Víctor Paredes]

I can recommend you to use scale bone tool especially for legs and arms. it get softer movements, imagine it, arms length you see is not the same every time.

[mkelley]

That's a good point, Selgin.

By scaling the bones you are essentially faking movement in the z plane (depending on how you look at your reference. For me, coming from the 3D world, I think of AS as an x/y plane with z being the depth). If an arm moves towards or away from the camera in z space then it would foreshorten.

I really can't do this with my rig because my hands are switch layers and thus would *really* complicate things (because as the limbs foreshortened the hands would also need to scale smaller, and this scaling would occur on both x and y axis and thus couldn't be easily faked with a hand bone, and trying to do it in a plane would be a horrendous effort to keep center of plane matched up with hand attachment -- been there, tried that). However, I think for others it's worth experimenting.

What we really need is a bone that will scale in both directions -- this issue has been raised before but I'm skeptical it's something that Mike will address any time soon.

[synthsin75]

Pretty good for a first test, CV. Obviously you have some other animation experience, since you seem to know what you need AS to do.

Your character is built much like I build mine. Basically cutout at the major joints. Mkelley was talking about making the whole arm, from shoulder to wrist, one shape, but how you're constructing that character, simple layer sorting works well.

Personally I don't think you gain enough with a single shape arm's flexing to be worth the trouble of rigging it to work right.

Yeah, Winsor shows the downfalls of using only images. Vectors are much more flexible.

[mkelley]

Personally I don't think you gain enough with a single shape arm's flexing to be worth the trouble of rigging it to work right.

Really, Wes?

So how do you get the arm creases (you know, when you bend your arm you get a crease that comes from either the top or the bottom depending on which way the arm bends). I know Vern used to (?) use two distinct shapes and always switch the layer order or some such whenever the arm bent a certain way but that's a royal PITA (and with his rig, totally unnecessary).

It takes me about three minutes to rig up an arm (and only two for a leg which only bends one way) using Vern's rig. After that it will bend perfectly in either direction AND deform the arm very realistically, unlike these "cutout" type animations (which always look cutout). Plus I can have textures on that arm which deform properly -- don't tell me you can do this with separate upper arm and forearm shapes.

I'm right in the process of cleaning up all our characters (about 50! Sigh) for our next round of episodes, so am always open to suggestions about alternate rigs. But so far I just can't see any advantages to what you're doing (and lots of disadvantages).

[synthsin75]

You're right, Mike. I can't make a texture look good on multiple shape limbs, but you also contend with this between limb and body.

I just zero some line widths or hide edges, leaving the bits that will be the creases as the limb bends. Then I just sort the layers for front or back.

If done right, it isn't obviously cutout. I would probably be more apt to use Vern's joint rig if I did constrain myself more to one, or fewer, views of my characters. But with more dynamic characters, point binding can sometimes cause some trouble.

I intend most my characters to have fully interpolated turns between angles. A more robust joint rig would be too much for me to contend with. For example, I want to be able to foreshorten any limb straight through a dead-on view, so the joints need to be kind of independent.

[mkelley]

Okay, I see -- yes, I'm strictly doing 3/4 animation (Family Guy/American Dad) so issues are fewer in that regard.

Regarding textures between body and arms -- this isn't unusual because Real World clothing has the same limitations. In the Real World sleeves are *always* separate pieces, and thus the patterns don't extend to the body. So it looks very natural to have the body and arms separate in that regard (but not so in terms of sleeves since the textures DO extend the length of the sleeve).

But the dialog is good -- I think it helps all of us to see/discuss what we are doing as we can always learn and improve our workflow. For example, I might even buy this guy's rig if/when he gets to the Paradise point if nothing more just to see how someone else approaches things.

[synthsin75]

Yeah that's always the trouble of having any kind of 'standard rig' in AS specifically and 2D animation in general. It's all so much slight of hand.

I totally agree. The more different solutions and ideas the better. It is usually the mixture of these that produce the best results.

[Canny Valley]

Interesting points raised there in that little back-and-forth, just now. I can think of some features, such as a character with tattoos down his arms, where cutout (pardon the pun) just wouldn't cut it.

That said, take a look at the image at the top of this page. Look at the bottom-most image. Her legs look very 3D, and that's an effect you can't achieve with whole-limb flexing. I chose cutouts for the character for precisely that reason.

You're right that there is no one single be-all, end-all animation technique. The character design must depend upon the kind of action you want to show... or is that the other way around?

In some ways, it's a relief, because it means I don't need to design my characters according to someone else's expectations. As long as I build a solid character that works well, some users will find it useful. People who don't have the time or skill to make their own characters probably aren't too picky about *how* it works. They just need something that looks good and works well that they can build a story around.

[mkelley]

I'm not sure I agree with you that your leg positions can't be done with a single leg -- indeed, that's exactly what I do and get the same (or really, even better) results. Are you talking about the "cut" of the leg into the upper thigh? That's what I was talking to Wes about -- Vern's rig automates this.

However, I will say this -- separate pieces like you have do seem to work better for "naked" limbs than for clothed pieces. A person's arm or leg stays much the same throughout the rotation (excluding the muscle movement like when a bicep is flexed). But to me this cutout look is very apparent when pants or sleeves are involved, and I MUCH prefer using a one piece limb for that, as the movement just seems much more natural.

Cloth pieces do not simply rotate -- they move "around" and this movement is almost automatic when using Vern's rig. To put a more scientific explanation on it, the underlying bone skeleton acts very much like a natural limb covered with cloth, and as it bends so the cloth does indeed deform in a way that looks correct. I've never seen this done properly with just "cutout" type animation.

Since nearly all my characters are clothed I rarely have any other than this sort of situation -- but I'd love to see some of Wes' work with clothed characters to change my mind (perhaps :>)

However -- none of this pertains specifically to your work, so I'm sorry if I got OT here. That's the problem sometimes with these rather open ended discussions.