Really? As instructors, this is one of things we now force the students in our Introductory workshops to do – nope, no rigging of your character until all your character’s anatomy have proper overlay areas at the joints. Is there any hope?įinally, in your 006 ArmA tutorial, you speak from professional experience - apparently as a “rigger” - about workflow: things that show up in your workflow that shouldn’t – like a full set of hand turn-arounds that AREN’T set up for a rig. Along with being a good animator, I’m a crack coder (art, math, compsci & physics degrees). I was disappointed to read that IK isn’t well-implemented enough to be of use (and don’t ever get me started on Flash “Bones” or “IK” - HA HA), as it was when using XSI, Maya or Max. Yes, I’m still using Flash (insert Nelson HA HA here) which is a fine tool for rapidly creating a simple, short clip or roughing a game character in. You’re really rocking not only the tutorials but also this thread! Reading through I already have several dozen questions & discussions that I won’t bog all of us down with here - and I’m not even using Harmony yet. Thanks again! Looking forward to all that you’re uploading! I imagine there’s really no rigging solution that can handle dimensional shadows without some compromise requiring going in and doing things frame by frame by hand, but hey, the rabbit hole goes deep and maybe there’s something you can offer? My first big project last month involved a nice cutout character rig that animated well, but I ended up spending the majority of my time animating the shadows by hand 24 fps on ones, and that got really tedious especially since no amount of polishing could entirely get rid of minor line jitters on the shadow layer. I’ve seen some efforts where the shadow is just a copy of the whole character that’s offset and given a shadow pass, and that’s great for quick results but doesn’t have any correlation to actual dimensional shadow casts which is an important thing for the type of work I’m doing.

I’d be very interested in learning more about the means of creating automated shadows and hilights.

Toon boom harmony rigging