I’ll be participating in this month’s 11 Second Club challenge. As a change of pace, instead of BasicGuy I’ll try using the Norman rig featured on their website. I’ve tinkered with this rig for a while and it seems perfect for animation tests. It you can adjust the body proportions pretty easily to build characters that look different, and none of these adjustments make the rig unstable. It has a standard array of body controls, all of which deform well and seem very stable. Norman features FK/IK matching like BasicGuy, but the scripting seems to take a different approach resulting an even faster workflow; there’s a single button to run FK/IK matching on the selected limb controller that automatically switches to the inactive control set (IE: running the command when a limb is in FK mode matches and switches to the IK rig). I’ve taken a look at the MEL and while scripting isn’t my forte, I can tell that it’s a very interesting approach.
The only thing that I’m not too big a fan of is its face rig. I love Jason Osipa-style facial control schemes (which is why I build them into all of my own rigs), and while there’s nothing wrong with Norman’s approach I just like having the added visual feedback from sliders. Norman’s face rig looks like it’ll still animate easily, with smooth open/close and wide/narrow mouth shapes as well as a variety of general shape changes and brow controls. One thing I’ve found that’s pretty neat is that there are aim-constrained eye controls that work in tandem with an FK eye rig. I’d like to dissect this rig and see how that’s done.
It looks like a really fun rig and I think it’ll work well. The goal with this project is to develop a demo reel-worthy character animation segment, so here goes!
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