Mery Rig

Since we'll be using the Moom rig a lot for this project, I thought that it could be good for me to practice some animating on a different rig to stop me from getting bored of the same one and to see how other rigs work. The Mery rig is a free download that has recently been released and has a similar style to some of the most recent Disney Princesses, already giving the rig a much different feel to the Moom rig,

I found quite early on to be patient with the animation timeline; whenever the waiting/loading symbol came up instead of my mouse button (usaully after clicking/typing in a lot of commands in a short space of time) the limbs of the character would suddenly multiple, which was completely irreversable. I had to revert to an earlier save to get rid of them, but it didn't make some entertaining results.

I wanted to try out animating some fighting moves to see how hard it was. I chose Tai Chi from the way it was used in Avatar: The Last Airbender; he characters move so smoothly, and it does work perfectly for inserting powers of some kind or just as a normal martial arts.

I had a lot of fun animating, although I found out that the knees on this rig don't move that slowly, so leg posting was awkward. The arms were extremely easy though, so it was fun to move them. The biggest problem I encountered earlier on was when I made key frames quite far apart. I wanted to see how well the automatic inbetweens worked, and though they were alright for a fair few movements, when it came to the hands and arms when they were in slightly different positions, the keyframes would make large arcs or appear a bit wobbly as it animation played back. Deleting keyframes on their own also didn't seem to work, as the inbetweens made before them seemed to stay there and mess up the animation when I made a new keyframe.

It got easier to get used to animating a I got further along, although the lack of movement in the knees and awkwardness of the hips didn't help too much. Another thing I found was that as I moved the mode into more extreme positions, it would affect my earlier frames. For example, the twisting of her torso and head began to happen much earlier than I had key framed, so at the start of the animation where she should stay forwards, she is already turning. I think this is mostly my on fault, since I ended up keyframing every 12 frames, and instead of moving some frames gradually, they made quite large jumps in movement and rather than making this happen really fast in half a second, it just happened slowly over 10. I definitely need to experiment with this a bit more to make sure that this doesn't happen and that I have full control over the rig.

Overall this was fun, and though the rig doesn't move quite as smoothly as Moom, it will still be fun to use more often.