Moom character pose #3

For the third and final pose, I chose an actual superhero. Michelangelo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Though I'm not entirely keen on some of the modern depictions of the characters, they do have some more dynamic poses. I foolishly thought that this one, compared to Captain Planet, would be pretty straightforward. How wrong I was!

It actually took me a bit longer than the other two. Somehow, at one stage, I managed to completely break Moom's foot and it took me ages to figure out how to fix it. I don't have a clue what I did - probably rotated too many pieces in the wrong direction - but the foot was just behaving very oddly, twisted in a direction I didn't like and I couldn't get it back to normal. Luckily, eventually I managed to just zero out all the rotations on each component and that popped it back to normal. After that, pretty plain sailing!

Trying to get him to touch the ground was interesting. I was initially too afraid to drop his hips any lower in case it messed up the position of the legs and feet, but eventually I bit the bullet and did it anyway. Happily, it was fine! 

The fingers were quite good fun, as weird as that sounds. I simply bent the first segment of each digit downwards in its 'natural' direction, then bent the last two segments upwards slightly to give the impression that they were pressing into the floor.

I'm actually pretty pleased with how it turned out. The thumb is bothering me, it's just sort of floating there. I probably should have tucked it out of sight or something. Oh well!

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!

Moom character pose #1

In order to familiarise ourselves with the Moom character rig in preparation for the walk cycles and character action sequences, we were asked to replicate a series of dynamic superhero poses using the rig's control objects.

I, of course, chose the greatest and most highly respected superhero of all time.

(Image from http://fuckyeahflashgordon.tumblr.com)

GORDON'S ALIVE!!!

Erm. Yes. Ahem.

It's an interesting pose that I thought would be quite fun (or possibly an absolute nightmare) to replicate. It's quite a basic pose but there are some quite interesting angles going on in the hips and legs.

Breaking down the pose into a basic skeleton demonstrates the angles and lines a little more clearly, making it a little easier to understand what each limb is doing. His hips are slanted in favour of the left (our right) leg - where most of his weight is. The shoulders slightly counter that angle, tilting on the opposite direction to maintain balance, with his arm high and outstretched. His front knee is raised very high and pointing slightly outwards - you can't even see much of the thigh behind it.

The torso is quite interesting - he's leaning back but looking straight at the camera. His neck is probably craned forward to maintain eye contact. He should be careful - he'll seriously strain his neck if he ain't careful.

It's certainly not brilliant, but I had a lot of fun with it! It's interesting trying to replicate such ridiculous muscular characters with a rig as lanky and weedy as this fellow - he has a lot more torso and less leggage than Flash Gordon. There are, unfortunately, some limitations with the rig - you can achieve most things if you play around with it enough, but there aren't individual controls for each section of limb which can make really fine-tuning the angles of things like the shins or forearms a bit difficult. 

There are some issues with the angle of the front arm - I couldn't find a way to sort of foreshorten it without the elbow bending, so it's not quite as dynamic as the original. His knee isn't quite as high as I'd have liked, and the angle of his shin is a bit wrong - it should be pointing inwards, but as said previously there is a limit to the amount of control you're given. I'm sure that if I'd played around with it enough I could have figured something out, but at this stage I'm just trying to familiarise myself with the rig at a fairly basic level.

That's not to say I'm complaining though - for all its minor limitations the rig really is quite amazing. What you can do with it is absolutely incredible - the foot controls and hips, especially.