Moho Animation Forum

What would you recommend above the available tutorials as good character rigging examples : Rose Agent? Maybe a cartoon solutions character? The vtc tutorials are a bit out of my current price range.
Thanks for any advice.

Personally I don't care for either.

Rose Agent is very well drawn -- but terribly rigged (IMHO). All example animation for her is done moving points, which I don't think is very practical for most people (but YMMV).

The Cartoon Solutions characters are better in that regard, but facial expressions are extremely limited (no eye or eyebrow changes, for example). I also kind of hate their mouths -- you need to have at least three sets of mouths, (again, IMHO) so that your character can smile and frown as well as be neutral.

But it really depends on your style and what you hope to get from examining such a rigging. If what you want is an all purpose sort of rig that will work for everyone you ain't gonna find it. If you are looking to simply learn some techniques then both of them would be worth having to look at. If you want to animate your own characters the real bottom line is you're going to have to develop your own rig and what works for you is unlikely to work for anyone else.

That said, look at these tutorials for something I think is better than either of these two (again, it isn't the be all and end all for everyone, but it's a good foundation and well written).

viewtopic.php?t=10266&highlight=tutorial

(And to put a shameless plug in, I'll be talking about all my own rigging on my web site here:

http://www.kelleytoons.com

as well as everything we do for our series. Should be interesting for at least beginners).

thanks Mike.
I'll keep an eye on your site.
I'm doing this for fun with no real aim other than simple stuff to make my kids laugh. Draw style will be very simple (retro-cartoon-ish and simpler). Animation style will also be quite simple - very cartoony and VERY minimal.
The idea for the example was just to see how things are laid out 'by professionals' . The tutorials are great and there's some good stuff on here. but, for a beginner, it's sometimes difficult to see how it all comes together.
Anyway, thanks again for the advice.

Rigging in AS is sort of an art. Getting the bones at the right size, placement, parenting and constraints takes awhile to learn. Go back though the forums and where someone has posted a file, download it and try to figure out just how he did it.

Dale

Thanks Dale and good advice. I've checked a few but also thought I'd do the same with some professionally rigged characters. I bought Wyatt from Cartoon Solutions and the rigging is quite easy to understand and seems tidy. It's causes quite a bit of slowdown though on a below average spec PC.

It's hard to tell, but I'm guessing the individual layers of those characters are bitmaps, right? If so, that's the reason for the slowdown.

Most folks will use vector based layers, and a good rig of them should not slow down even a sub-standard PC (I do stuff on my netbook which has about the lowest specs of anything and it works just fine).

Hmmm.. they're all vector layers from what I can see. Maybe I need to check some optimisation settings but most of the examples are OK including the startup file. Oddly loading Winsor or Aya directly causes performance issues. I apperciate they contain image layers but not sure why there would be a difference with the start-up file.

Been looking at getting WIENERTOONZ. Wonder if this would help with learning the rigging process?