Okay, so I finally got free from college and illness to make a big dump on Cari's rig and animation.
First off, an introduction to the model and the rig. Cari was 100% the easiest prospect between the three of them. Quadrupeds tend to only be able to move certain ways and bend certain ways, which makes rigging and animation more a case of getting the
amount of movement just right and less a case of thinking how exactly to animate it.
I will say, this model was a bit weird to work with. The design is very compact, and the model was built to look well when seen from specific angles which made my fave angle to work with (the sideways orthographic view) look very awkward.
This is the rig I went with. You can see that it has very low bone counts on the legs and a
very articulated spine, neck and tail. This was a deliberate choice on my end to allow the person who was going to do the render (QxC) to elongate/collapse proportions as needed for the final look.
Another thing you may notice is that Caribolt has little to no neck. This made animating the head movement a royal pain because the collar and horns would clip into the body with too much neck movement.
Something you can see here that you didn't in my last rig since I wasn't animating it are the IK and target bones. I talk of course of the four small prongs on the feet and the floating bones outside the rig. The whole point of those was to be able to completely control the model with a couple bone movement through IK (Inverse Kinematics) which essentially creates 'ripple effects' through response movement to the control bone, and FK (Forward Kinematics) which are the opposite and create connected movement through complimentary transformations.
Here's a couple of test poses I did to try and see what I could do with the rig. The model didn't seem to take to well to certain types of movement, but I feel like it was incredibly functional and rather easy to use.
Now, to the animations. If you look at pokemon animations, most cervid idle animations
don't move like, at all. This is incredibly boring in my opinion, which led to me trying to create a more dynamic animation to begin with.
Caribolt animation v 0.1
This was eventually deemed
too dynamic so I shifted towards a more conservative, bobbing in place approach without really polishing the cycle you see above.
Caribolt Animation v 0.2
This is the first iteration of said animation, with fairly big movements since I tend to favour that. I was told it looked like cari was doing squats, so I toned down the verticality aspect of the body's movement in further iterations. I also tried to add some nice movement with the ears to break the monotony of the animation. This version went through a
ton of changes based on recommendations from mostly QxC to get the actual movement of it as perfect as possible. That included me spending like two and a half hours getting this particular movement right, mostly because the collar meant I had to be really careful with downward movement to prevent clipping
The head bob that took like two hours
We also had some looping issues, since the hyper-articulated spine meant that a fix I had to do for the neck and back foot rippled and tossed every bone
one pixel out of loop. Now, you may think one pixel isn't the worst, but on the render cycle it creates a very noticeable jerk or jump. So we fixed that, then reduced the length of the animation from 46 frames to 32 frames on loop. This was the end result (post QxC render):
It came out rather nice, I'd like to think. It has enough movement to not look completely dull, yet static enough to feel like an idle animation. As a final note, it turns out that the fact that I spent so much time articulating the spine was important since in the final render QxC elongated the neck. These are the final results we had, though QxC may have better stills and renders:
All in all, this was really fun. College had meant I hadn't been able to animate in a long while, and rigging is always a treat. That's the rig and animation (and a bit of render) digest for Caribolt. I hope you found this informative!