#householdobject

After animating the arm, I looked into what I could do to completely finish off my animation. I looked into some of the filters that After Effects offers, the first of which tried being the ‘bad TV’ setting, which I quite liked. I also looked at the presets ‘night vision’ and ‘cracked tiles’ to see which aesthetic I’ like to go for.

Notes

- Foot switches could be smoother and quicker to indicate better bounciness.  - Add a kind of ground or environment to place him in.  - Left foot dips beneath the ‘floor’.  - Arm looks too much like a catapult, needs some weight to it? - Add more bend to knees. 

Working with the notes I was given, I made a few small changes to my animation. I first fixed the foot on the left so it wouldn’t phase through the ‘floor’ of the scene, and I tried to make the other foot come down faster to create more of a bounce. I couldn’t do much about the knees bending, however. 

Next was working on the arm clamp’s arc - unfortunately this rig doesn’t work quite how I’d like it to. Due to the amount of parenting happening, I can’t parent the arm back to the tablet so it follows (as each part is parented to it’s own rig piece). I wondered if it were possible to parent an object to two things but wasn’t sure this was possible. 

I tried parenting the controller for the arm rig to the tablet, first the overall controller and then the ‘arm’ section of it. Both attempts didn’t have the desired result, although the first was closer. 

For some reason parenting the ‘arm’ section made the arm smaller, and disconnect in places. It does follow the tablet, which is what I wanted, but of course this doesn’t really work. I did try to just scale up the arm, but this didn’t really work directly and breaks the rig.

Installing DUIK, I then tried to rig the character, which I found remarkably more difficult:

I couldn’t get the joints to stay together convincingly. I followed an online tutorial about this, in which the process seemed a lot simpler (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KbtQV-Gir8).

Next I had a go at another function in after effects with Duik, which involved adding pins to my puppet and moving it that way. As a test, I only did this with the arm/clamp of my robot. However I found that this feature might be best used with a humanoid character, as it replicates the form of an arm that naturally bends - which doesn’t work for a static in shape robot. 

The last thing I tried was to add a preset of an arm to the clamp and rig the movement through that. Following this small tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IqQNPpyJEU) I rigged the arm in it’s 3 separate pieces so I would have more flexibility in it’s movement. 

This method seemed to work the best for the arm movement overall. It allows for the arm to do almost a full 180° so I can add the amount of follow through / overshooting in the animation that I want to. I wondered if this method would also work with the legs or if I would be stuck manually animating them.

When I tried the leg option, it didn’t work in quite the same way as the arm did. The automatic leg rig has a lot more joints than my tablet’s leg, and I think that removing these extras might be causing complications. 

I also went back to try the pin method again as this was simpler to set up. At first I didn’t mind the flexibility of the joints as it could allow for some interesting animation techniques, however I couldn’t seem to find an ‘auto-stretch’ option like I had done with other rigging options. I would usually untick this option to stop the pieces from being stretched out to keep the volume of the pieces more uniform. 

To give this rig a test I only animated the left leg, and was really put off by how much the foot stretches. I’m not sure if I can keep a consistent volume with this. 

I also wanted to give a simpler design a go - this one is just a sphere with a stick and a piece of string attached to it for now. This loop shows the robot trying to get the plant into sunlight, but being restricted by the distance the string will allow it to go. I do like the goofiness of this concept so it’s a good fall back if I really can’t manage the tablet gif. 

Another idea came when I glanced at my terrarium, and how I struggle to keep the plants inside happy due to lack of light in my room. The idea centers around a small robot with an extendable arm and solar panels, so it can detect where the sun is shining near a window and move the plants into the rays as the day goes on. Design wise I could imagine this robot having quite a scatterbrained personality (obsessing over where the sun is) and as it’s on a string I can see it bumping into the wall a lot, hence the cushion taped to it. 

Another concept I quite like with my portable tablet. It would be able to move around freely and it’s legs could act like a stand - the clamp on it’s back to attach it to desks. Design wise I also liked having a drawing program open with a smiley face as it makes the design friendly in appearance.