Howdy,
Just wanted to show what I’ve been working on lately. Here is the character Wander from the short lived Disney series Wander of Yonder. This is my first honest attempt with the skeleton tool and while I’m being honest I’ll admit that this is less of a character rig and more a pile of vertexes mercilessly beaten into the shambling vestige of a decent walk cycle. Regardless, feel free to scoop it up and do whatever with it cuz god knows Disney won’t ever touch this show again. I’m hoping to improve the rig moving forward, so I’d love to hear any feedback and suggestions
Re-creation
Reference
WanderRig.sifz (907.2 KB)
Some discussion:
- It was challenging trying to use the skeleton tool with Wander’s noodley limbs since there are no clearly defined elbow or knee joints a lot of the time. I did a bunch of extra work tweaking bones and limb nodes to fit the limbs in the reference
- Wander’s hat is made up of 2 groups, one group for the parts in front of his head and another group for the parts behind. I wanted to link them together, but I had to choose between that or linking them to the head bone. I ended up using the bone link and then animating both hat groups by multi-selecting the origins which was a pain because origin points are immune to the selection box. Any suggestions?
- The smooth-moves tool was my best friend for this animation, however all that vertex manipulation comes with it’s own challenges. I had difficulty reusing poses and shapes because I could not duplicate recursively from the group canvas parameter or in bulk from a multi-selection. I had to duplicate each element individually.
- I spent a lot of time fixing line connections at the object interfaces at his wrists and ankles. Maybe there’s a better way to structure it to avoid the extra work, but I don’t have any ideas at the moment.
- The original animation is generally bouncier than my re-creation. That is to say there is a higher degree of easing between key poses compared to my version. Since the curve editing interface does not currently have functionality for recursive editing on groups or bulk multi-select editing, fixing this requires frame-by-frame tweaking on in-betweens as far as I can tell.
- I ran into some trouble when manipulating keyframes to tweak timing. The reference animation was also affected by the adjustment but it took a while before I finally noticed so I had to go back and redo some parts. I suppose that exported canvases are the intended solution for this kind of issue, but in my case, I needed to animate in context to follow the reference frames so it was not an option for me.
I used the current development version of Synfig.
(are the gifs static for anyone else?)
Actually the Graph/Curve panel does support multiple parameters, but we don’t let multiple selection on Parameter panel, so…
