It maintains the shape of the limb. Eliminates those "loops" at the center of the joint. Looks perfect with different shape ordering (forearm over bicep, bicep over forearm). Either side of the joint bulges slightly for added realism (This can be tweaked). Maintains a nice "crease" line with out much of the stroke "looping" back up.
And yes... everyone will hate it because it requires 15 bones per joint. Don't mess with me and my bones. It works... looks great... uh... not so easy to set up but I don't care... I use copy/flip bones script to take care of a lot of it.
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The basic concept is 6 springs. One one each side of the bicep/thigh and forearm/calf and two springs for either side of the joint.
These springs push and pull a single point on a very low point mesh to maintain the volume of the limb AND keep that nice crease at the joint.
I love this joint. I don't care how hard it is to set up. I would like to script this at some point... push a button... bingo! New joint.
LOL -- yeah, you're right, Vern. I doubt whether some of us (I'm not saying everyone, just some) would ever consider such a complicated rig. But if it WAS scripted...
Of course, the ideal thing would be for Mike to just build in this kind of functionality into AS. I was thinking about this earlier this evening on my drive to tennis -- one of the big things about 3D bones (at least in my software) was options to always maintain the volume of the bend. Just that -- a simple switch to set.
In any case, I'm glad you found your answer. I'm still pretty happy with that earlier rig you posted (for arms -- I find I can actually get the legs to work just fine because they only have to bend in one direction, mostly).
What I like about this one over the other one is that it can be "tweaked" to do more. I can adjust the bulge of the arms. I think too with some more fiddling I could get the crease "straighter" than it is.
That crease line is the real pain for joints. It is the nature of AS splines to create those large loops when the points on either side of another point are equidistant.
The way to get a "pointy" bend is to offset either side. But if you do that then the "bulge" as the two halves come together looks really BAD. The top or bottom half looses volume and doesn't look right at all.
Rather than a "maintain volume button"... I would like to see a new type of constraint that could control a points curve value. As the bone bends, it causes a single point to go between "peak" and "smooth" (sounds like another script idea). This would solve all the problems with joints.
Yeah, as you mention this I remember I've had some good luck actually just changing a crease point to peak -- you can't always do this, of course (because of the look of the limb when straightened, as well as bending it in the opposite direction) but at times I've found it works just fine.
I don't know if Mike is even working on AS anymore, but your idea in functionality would certainly be in my top three things to implement (along with fixing the Actions bug and allowing specified directories for batch output, neither of which should take more than a few minutes of programming time).
I would like to see a new type of constraint that could control a points curve value
at this rate you definitively would eliminate all the rest of animation channels!
Dear heyvern, I perfectly understand you requirement about control the animation with less channels... but don't you think that it would make it extremely automatic? I think that animation is like making a painting. You first make the overall movements (using bones yes they are great) and finally with several loops you "polish" the animation (refine bones animation and/or complete the not possible bones results with point motion - curvature included ) In this way you can achieve a final result more "organic" and less "robotic". In my honest opinion the efforts to make bones control completely the point motion should be balanced between the setup time, the "robotic" results and the needed time to refining the animation.
i have to agree with Genete - personally i'm already happy with the time i save using bones for the 'meat and potatoes' of animation over traditional frame by frame drawings! if you have to spend an extra day or two correcting point motion its better than months in-betweening? i dont know if the rigging ROI is becoming unbalanced...
YOUR ROI in doing this for selling character packs is another story, as the same character/rig will be used over and over by the purchaser, but for me - every scene/character/view is different and its normally MUCH quicker cutting corners than rigging for days
I don't know how making a bone rig work "properly" would in any manner eliminate the artistry that goes into an animation. The whole idea of using bones is to get objects to deform as you bend the bone joint -- to have them overlap and be useless (I can't even think of an animation that would want to have this effect on purpose) just negates the using of bones in the first place.
IOW, a bone's whole reason for existence is to deform an object smoothly and not cause the edges to overlap -- otherwise you wouldn't need bones (everything could be done with just the position and rotate layer tools). Correcting it so that it works better isn't just a good idea -- it's a real practical necessity.
There will still be LOTS of vertex and bone tweaking you can (and will have to) do in order to achieve your vision. Using the argument that improving bones will make things too automatic is as silly as saying that we shouldn't have switch layers because they make lip sync too easy (because each mouth should really be animated, vertex by vertex, in order to remain "artistic").
The reason for the bones in my world is to make the process easier... fewer steps.
If you go in to an animation and tweak the certain areas using point motion... and you are always moving the same points in the same way, then a bone could be assigned to do that.
I just heard an interview with the guy who wrote and directed Pixar's Wall-e.
He was hired by Pixar and had never used a computer. He was "old school". Hand drawn animation. They hired him for his skills as an animator.
He was reluctant at first and not sure about the computer but said that after using it, after discovering that using the computer for animation was like being a puppet master with 100's of strings to push and pull to control the characters, all the stuff he liked about animating was easier to do.
Instead of drawing every frame from scratch he could focus his attention on the acting and the other apsects of the animation process.
I approach AS the same way as 3D software. In 3D you don't really have the option of going in and "tweaking individual points". In 3D the rig is everything.
Having a bone control the curvature or thickness of a point would NOT "remove all the channels". They would still be there, you could still change things by hand, but the things that we do BY HAND all the time, the exact same way could be done using a bone.
You don't honestly think that at the end of the day of animating Toy Story, or Wall-e that the animators go in by hand and move the individual polygons of the characters? No, there are bones that handle all that. Yes the may grab a control widget or bone and move something but it's done with a control widget.
I want 2D characters that can be controlled entirely by bones and look as good or nearly as good as a character that was "hand drawn" and tweaked.
The more I work with AS the more I know this is possible and we only need a handful of tiny new things added in for bones to control more aspects of the animated channels. A few more bone constraints.
I am working on animations all week. I can't tell you how freaking ANNOYING it is to move a whole section of bone keys to adjust the timing only to realize after rendering that there were the same keys on FOUR DIFFERENT VECTOR LAYERS that had point motion in the same spot that I didn't move the keys.
Then flipping back and forth, back and forth to line up the keys again...
Due to your copy bones script I finally got around to seeing if I could use this joint -- and I don't get it.
It doesn't appear as if any but four points are bound to any bones (yet when I try it on my own rig the whole thing falls apart when trying to do this, as a bone offset won't allow any but those four points to move to my torso). If I bind it as I would "normally" (using your other rig approach) I don't get nearly as smooth a deformation as I would with that rig.
So, great guru, could you share the magic as to how the points are bound to the bones to get this thingee to work?
Actually there are more than 4 points bound depending on the arm or limb is drawn on the vector layer. I neglected to bind those points because of the simplicity of the file. In some cases you may need to bind points to the bicep and forearm bones.
This might help. Just keep in mind it depends on the set up whether or not you need to bind the bones.
This is not an "automatic" solution. Because each character and bone set up is going to be different you may need to tweak the bone positions, lengths, angles and the points.
I just used this rig for two characters recently. It took a bit of tweaking but the results were always good. It is the nature of the points and how they bend and create those loops that makes it a bit fussy to get just right. One tiny nudge and that joint loop "pops". Using onion skin helps.
I'm getting a new PC soon and will probably be much more capable of producing video tutorials. I should probably record a session using the rig and customizing it for a character.
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It works... looks great... uh... not so easy to set up but I don't care... I use copy/flip bones script to take care of a lot of it.
at this rate you definitively would eliminate all the rest of animation channels!
