Player Pascal - Progress log #02
One of the first problems to tackle with Pascal was: "How does an arm bend in Minecraft?"
The common consensus is that Minecraft arms bend at a sharp angle, retaining the blocky form you recognize ingame and in fan animations. This goes way back with animations by CaptainSparklez and BootstrapBuckaroo, but is also seen in more modern animations by people like Cubical.
Should be simple enough, right? Just make a rectangle and bend it with a two-boned rig, right?
Turns out it is not so simple.
Without using modifiers, constraints or other nifty tricks, meshes and wireframes want to collapse or stretch a little bit to accommodate for the movement of the bones. Long story short: This means that the blocky, rigid appearance we want to go for wont be achieved with just a simple rig. I needed to go Advanced™
At this point, for the first time since ever working with 3D software at school or professionally in over 10 years, I stumbled upon Drivers and Shape Keys.
Since Blender's documentation is a dry boring slog to get through, let alone to understand if you are a visual learner like myself, I had to shift through a couple of dozen YouTube videos to understand the basics.
The pink line you see above are 4 vertexes shifting around based on the value in my Shape Key. When I attach a Driver to this value, connected to the same bone that I move the arm with, I can finally create angles like these:
Expression: tan(rotation_euler/2)
Don't ask me (yet) how the math works, just know that it does. And if it does not, we will dive back in once we start rigging the full body!
Thanks for joining me again today, I`ll see you at the next post. 🐨👍
