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Good information on Andy Rig

A lot has been going on. I hope that this blog update can be enjoyed and even useful to other creative people out there.So we will kick this off with my random drawings from observation since last post.

Triplets of Belleville? Not hardly.

Grandmother and granddaughter reading
Corporate people with access badges

So I went into the demo reel to make some small changes to Nuclear Sucker scene. The joints were not rotating smooth and soon it was clear that it would be easier to recreate rather than repair. Aside from the animation work {shown below}, the rig for the character has some issues.

The Andy (short for "androgynous") Rig was made for students at the Savannah College of Art and Design. This is a fun and versatile character rig that looked very nice in 2007 and 2008. This rig has survived many Maya updates and takes a little more patience to use after Maya 2015.

I would like to offer a tip to others who will use this rig. Try to stay away from Viewport 2.0 because of performance issues. While working on the rig change the global setting from smooth 1 or 2 down to proxy. This will simplify the geometry while you are working with movement. Flip this back into high detail once it is time to render out your work. Another thing I did was select the control curves for like systems and assign them to their own layer. Now you can select all items on that layer or hide them all by using the layer tools.

Next I needed to film the scene acting it out and make new gesture drawings.

Yes those sloppy and fast drawings that capture the lines of action and movement. Here are a couple I had done for class last year. Each of these were done in 15-30 seconds. Clean up is not needed at this point.

Ok - so now it is time to draw the action as I am inspired by the film that was made.

These are merely a guideline like stepping stones to keep me on a course. Numbers shown are proposed frame numbers. Matching the video FPS to 24 and using the timeline to match audio makes the timing from the reference much simpler.The drawings are still able to adapt like fluid to mesh with the style of animation and character body type.

Along the way even the facial features are considered.

After all of these steps happen I simply had to get the rig to perform according to this timing. Animation tests and playblast before render. I am more pleased than what was on the demo reel before. Please take a moment and see the changes. The demo reel is found on the home page. It is a continual work in progress.

Thanks for reading.


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