Moom pose 2

Despite all shady allegations regarding his five young Planeteers, I like Captain Planet, so I opted to use him in all his star-studded spangliness as a reference for my next Moom pose.

Of course, in keeping with the very essence of Captain Planet, I chose the campest image Google could possibly offer:

Setting all sparkly kawaii anime-ness aside, it is actually quite an interesting pose. The angle of the head and arms is quite extreme and dynamic and I thought that, again, it would be interesting to see how I might be able to replicate this pose giving the limitations of the rig.

I must admit that I worried, at first, whether or not it would actually be possible, but fortunately my perseverance paid off.

It's not an exact replica and it certainly lacks some of the dynamism (is that a word?) of the original. The biggest issue I found was actually getting the body to lie at that angle. The chest control isn't designed to be translated. You can do it, certainly, but it usually results in... well...

Mass noodleage.

However, I could see no other option to get the body to lie flat in the air. Moving his hips back still resulted in the chest sticking up and no amount of rotation would fix it. He just looked like he was kissing his crotch, and that makes nobody happy.

So, I did break one of the first rules: I translated a control not intended to be translated. Only a very, very tiny amount, just to bring the chest in line with the hips. I didn't move it beyond any constraints that would otherwise have been set so it looks alright, I think.

The other nice thing about this pose was that it gave me an opportunity to use the synoptic viewer, which is a nice little interface that makes selecting the numerous rig controls much more intuitive. By selecting any rig objects and hitting F3 the panel opens. It's a much nicer way of working, I think - I frequently find that after moving joints around some of the smaller objects (especially the Up Vectors, which control the angle of the knees and elbows) get lost somewhere in the 3D space and it becomes tricky to figure out which one corresponds to which elbow or whatever, so the synoptic viewer keeps everything in place and you can quickly see which one is which. 

An additional point of interest within the viewer is the 'hand' tab. This allows much greater control over each individual digit of the hand - essentially, you can control the bend and flex of each joint in the fingers. How cool is that?

I also got the chance to use the clavicle controls for this one! The clavicle controls are two small eliptical objects floating behind Moom. You can use them to relax or hunch the shoulders, leading to much more natural looking shoulders. His arm in this pose is stretched behind him so I dropped the shoulder a little to give it more reach.

Again there are a few problems with the angles - the front elbow should point forward a little more so that the forearm and hand are in front of his face, but for a relatively complex pose I don't think I did too horribly!