Animation Boot Camp - Week 1 - Speed Poses

As part of the finals curriculum here at Full Sail (at least for animators) for three weeks we do a couple of tests to get the animation juices pumping alongside working on our demo reels. The first week is speed poses, or strong poses, I may alternate between the two, though they mean the same thing here. Though there is no direct animation here, we do these to help us develop a key eye for silhouette, to see which poses can be most interesting, and to understand a broader spectrum of emotions. I covered strong poses a long time ago in this post so I won't repeat myself too much. But since I used different rigs this time, I'll discuss some of what made each one unique.

Day one, I used the Ben rig. This is a simple rig with easy to navigate controls. The facial controls are their on GUI which I really love seeing in a rig. Though with its ease of use there are some problems I had. Some of the facial expressions can not be pushed as far as desired due to the fact that the jaw can't open very much. Also scaling the head causes the tongue to no longer be in the proper spot. This is a minor nitpick, but I did run into it when trying to scale him similarly to another character in one of my other scenes.

Day two, I used the Bonnie rig. For being a pretty old rig, it is very robust. I has a optional hair dynamics and a full picker for ease of navigation. I chose to use neither of these features though. I prefer to go straight into the rig and create my own mel buttons, and since there was no movement, the hair dynamics weren't necessary at this time. I guess my biggest struggle with this rig was pushing some of the stronger poses like the ones sitting down. I had to sometimes cheat the camera because the arms and legs wouldn't go that far.

On day three I used a variation of the Norman rig called red. There are many customizations of this rig out there so finding one you like shouldn't be that hard. This is one of my favorite rigs because of its simple design allowing for ease of use while also being open ended enough to really let you push the poses and emotions. The Norman rig though, doesn't have the facial GUI's that other rigs may have, but if you can tell, that's not that big of an issue for me. Many of Norman's more advanced blends are done through custom transform attributes on the controls (like where you would find translate, rotate, and scale).

For day four, I used the Mery rig. This is a relatively new rig and has become quite popular. Because of its young age, it is still being updated so be sure to let the team know any feedback you may have if you've tried it. As for me, I have had issues loading the picker, which isn't so bad because I had just mentioned that I don't use pickers that much, but the problem here is that Mery's facial controls are far off in the viewport, so every time you use her, you have to make a separate camera to see those controls.

I encourage you to go out and try each of these rigs and see which one works best for you (maybe they all do). This isn't the end of these rigs for me either because I use all of them more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.