This Rusty Animator Gets to Do Cool Stuff Again
Happy Easter, my dear fellow Hivers! I hope you're all doing fine and taking full advantage of this wonderful time to be a crypto-earning blogger on the blockchain. So don't stop churning out those posts, and keep striking while the iron is hot.
Sometimes Good Things Come From Bad Situations
My responsibilities at work are finally coming into sync with my Blender-learning journey, and you will now find me posting more about what I am presenting to you today. This is the reason why I am learning the software in the first place - to bring characters and creatures to life through modeling, rigging, and animation.
Now, with the financial situations caused by the pandemic that's affecting all industries all over the world, my employers are now looking for ways to tighten their belts. So I suggested that we let go of some of our expensive software licenses, and switch to open-source versions of what we use. They couldn't agree more with what I said.
One of the senior animators reminded our superiors of my somewhat groundbreaking use of Blender alongside traditional animation, and digital 2D animation (ToonBoom Harmony), for the direct-to-video movie, Curious George 3: Back to the Jungle, back in 2013. And since Blender was already in our arsenal, albeit in a limited-use capacity (for modeling) due to mostly everyone's preference for animating in Maya or 3dsmax, I and one of seniors were tasked to do get up to speed on rigging and animation in Blender.
Before January ended I scoured my favorite 3D asset sites for free rigged characters we could test and also Youtube for all the recommended tutorial channels to learn Blender's rigging and animation tools and workflows from. So for the next two months, my fellow senior and I will be on reduced production responsibilities and focus on learning. I've never felt more pressured in my life than I am right now, but at least it is going to be a lot of fun.
Out of the dozen or so characters I downloaded - the cake-bearing alien in a previous post is one of them - this one I am presenting here has become our favorite to work with. This rigged character is Rain v2.0, and she was made by a stellar team of awesome artists at the Blender Foundation.
I didn't like it at first because I wanted a more action-oriented character, but my more senior colleague had already put the rig through its paces, told me that it was production-quality and was rigged in a way that I wanted to learn how to do in Blender. That piqued my curiosity and so I caved in and checked it out.
To fellow 3D artists and CGI-savvy people, this rig has the standard features you would expect in one, while the others are something only Blender has.
- IK/FK toggle and snapping for the limbs
- Stretchy IK toggle for the limbs and spine
- Bendy Bone powered body tweak controls
- FK Hinge toggles and snapping
- IK Parent switching and snapping
- Layered face controls
- Eye target parent switching and snapping
- Designed with newcomers and pros both in mind
- Simple and clean rig UI
If you want to take a crack at it you can download the file at:
https://cloud.blender.org/p/characters/5f04a68bb5f1a2612f7b29da
Process Video
So here she is in action! It's just a posing session for now, but someday I'll be animating her doing the usual body mechanics exercises we animators do when learning a new software. And since she has a good facial rig, I'll be doing lots of facial expressions and dialogues too. Since this video is also meant to be shared in a Blender FB group that I moderate, I have chosen to demonstrate something that many beginner 3D character artists know nothing about.
A Word About Posing Characters
As someone who has been in the industry since 1998, I've noticed that many 3D art beginners here nowadays are often non-artists who suddenly decided to get into 3D animation after seeing all those cool Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks animated movies and VFX-laden Hollywood blockbusters. Most of them just dove straight into learning how to use 3D software, without first learning the art fundamentals required to become bonafide character artists, such as human and animal anatomy.
Those artists often end up having difficulties later since their lack of knowledge of human anatomy would show up in the way they pose and animate characters. Most of them have no idea about the limits of the range of motion of our limbs and other body parts. Many aren't even aware of the dynamic relationship between the hips, shoulders, and the spine that connects those two.
But aside from that, what really ticks me off about them is that they don't know about weight and balance and how to show them in their poses too. So in this blog I decided to show the one thing that proves that an artist has knowledge of the human figure. It's called contrapposto.
To those who aren't familiar with it, it's the automatic weight shift our bodies do to keep us balanced when one foot is shifted to the side or raised off the ground and results in the sudden loss of support from the lifted leg on that side of the body, causing the spine to bend and shift the weight of the torso towards the side of the body that is still being supported by the other leg and foot.
Contrapposto was made popular in Classical Greek sculpture and was copied later on by artists of the Renaissance period. However, it is not just a pose but a natural balancing act of our bodies, and one that can be seen in how we walk, run, or stand.
As animators, weight is something that we are constantly reminded of and expected to show in our character poses and movement. But the artists that aren't educated on figure art and trained in animation in a studio or school, don't know anything when starting out in their quest to become animators. That's why I need to do this and show it to them so they will improve their character posing skills, which would hopefully improve their animation skills too.
More Poses
And here are some more poses I've done after the screen recording session. If I looked kind of clumsy in handling her in the video, it's because I'm posing her with my graphics tablet's stylus as my mouse died a few weeks ago.
The Verdict
It's a great rig, one I wouldn't mind using professionally in a big production and not just some Youtube video or character animation demo reel. Kudos to the awesome team who created it. I wish they'd make other of their high-quality rigs available to the public, so that people like me can take them apart to learn from. If you're learning 3D character animation with Blender, and you're tired of the characters you've been using to practice and hone your skills on, download this rig and let her help you push your character animation skills to your fullest potential.
And that's it for now. There are other character rigs I am testing and they will be featured in my next rigging and animation blogs soon. Thank you for reading and I hoped you liked what I shared, and even learned something from it. Stay safe, have a nice day, and God Bless!
Ecency Desktop, Blender, ShareX, GIMP, and Shotcut.
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Cut the newbies some slack, some of us learn in ways that are extremely awkward and nonsensical to people who learn in whatever's become the traditional way to learn something, in some cases it's lack of choice and in cases of people like me, works better for our brains XD
And it's generally easy to point them towards learning all that kind of stuff anyway on a per work basis :)
At first glance it looks like the Rigify rig, is it a different one?
Just echoing the observations of the older senior artists and our superiors. Besides, it's not just lack of knowledge of art fundaments that we're dealing with here. It's also about the deteriorating academic performance of our elementary and high school-age youth that resulted in lower intellectual and cognitive abilities. I'll stop sugar-coating it. The kids here are getting dumber, to the point that it has become a national crisis now.
About two-years ago there was a test of academic performance conducted on grade school kids here in S.E. Asia. The Philippines came out last in everything our youth were tested for. Poor reading comprehension, math skills, and critical thinking ability, and so on. I'm suprised that they can even get into college or university in spite of it.
And in our organization I'm the poor sod who has to deal with them. In fact I've been told by our bosses to stop being too lenient with them and exercise command responsibility. When the boss is pissed-off he likes to say "This is a job, not a friggin' picnic. Tell them to get those brains working.". The pandemic is taking its toll on everyone and tempers are always flaring. So it's best to stay out of their crosshairs.
I'm making a bunch of NFTs in my spare time, and if I'm lucky enough to make a huge sale that earns me enough to tide me over for a couple of years I'll quit my job and start working on my animated short stories. At least the headaches I will get with it are a natural part of it, and not something that was caused by having to deal with others' inadequacies. 😉
This might be a common problem. We don't use the school system so everything is just observation and anecdotes, I do hear a lot along these lines. Over here it's complaints that a lot of the kids getting passed out barely have acceptable language and maths basics never mind anything else. As far as I can tell it seems that somehow everyone having the right to access education (which I agree with) somehow became conflated with everyone having the right to graduate with passing grades regardless of how they did (um?).
In our case here it's probably fostered or at the very least not helped by the participation award culture we have here, I don't know if that's a problem over there.
Good luck with the NFT sales, hope you make a few huge ones :D
Hey, thanks a lot for your vote! You're my 1000th follower btw :)
I loved your explanation about posing and anatomy. Hard for me, but I'm still trying to learn more about the human body.
I tried learning how to use this app but was not successful.