IK & FK & Overlapping Action
In the 3D class this week, we ran over the basics of IK and FK animation rigs, and we put together a few animations, to learn about the advantages and disadvantages of the two rigs.
The first thing we did was to animate a pendulum swing with the two rigs, This is the IK rigs' animation:
The animation doesn't look great, since the elbow can't be rigged in tandem with the above connector or the hand. All that I can do is move the hand freely, which means the rig doesn't automatically move in a good arc. This is unfortunate, but I think this rig works a lot better for character animation. It makes it easier to aim the elbow and get lifelike positions with it, but the con is that arcs don't work very well.
Next is the FK animation rig. This one was a lot easier to animate in terms of arcs. The rig only lets you rotate the rig handles, which means everything has to move in an arc. This mean that the animation is a lot cleaner and it moves in a perfect arc automatically. It took a ton less work to get the animation to look realistic, and to get a sense of weight on the rig. The downside of this kind of rig is that it's a bit more tedious to aim a rig at something, since you can only control it through rotation.
Finally, we went through the basics of Overlapping animation, to give the rigs a bit of drag. I was actually surprised that you could use the Overlapping Animation in an animation like this. I had always figured it only applied to characters with extra clothing or bits that would drag behind the character. I didn't realise that most things moving would have at least one bit that would drag behind the character.
It was a pretty short class, so that's all I really have to say.
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