Playing with the Norman Rig

It's been a some time since I started using the characters given by AM. They're great, supereasy to control and the models are flexible so we can customize them to look taller/smaller, more feminine, etc. I did want to experiment other rigs though, mainly to see how different rigs are build and work. Of course, the basics are the same: you need controls for the different body parts, there may be IK/FK controls, etc, but some details are different.

I have seen the Norman rig on several animations and it seemed pretty flexible. I found this page (www.romanim.com/norman_database.php) where you can get different customized Norman rigs: different female, male and kid models. This was great, because I didn't want to customize it right now, but just play with the rig. First I thought I'd try a model I had never used, so I downloaded the wrestler...

First thing to do was to plan the animation...well, I had never done a parkour shot...and to try a new rig it seemed a nice idea to do a body mechanics shot. Short stuff, a couple of seconds or so. I had recently seen a female parkour video which I wanted to use:

Of course...I can't use that reference for a big heavy man...so I decided to leave the wrestler for some other time and downloaded a light female rig ;-) Ok, I could have looked for a heavy man doing jumps, but I wanted to use that reference (not really lazy, just more inspired by that).

I chose a simple jump over an obstacle (they call it kong) that appears a few times in that video and made a few thumbnails...very, very rough stick-figure sketches. Marked down the estimated frame number where those poses would happen and went into blocking.

I didn't do any research about how to use that new rig, went right into Maya to figure it out because it's pretty intuitive. I confess though that I counter-animated a little while until I realized the IK hands were linked to the chest rotations and unlinked them. I had not worked with this before, but I suppose it's pretty common (and handy!) to have the possibility to say with which body part the hands should move along with. This was the main thing I learned doing this first shot with Norman.

So here's that blocking:

Then I went ahead and worked on splining it. I removed the black color on her arm, so it was clearer what was happening while she was jumping. Also made a simple camera animation to follow her. Here's the final animation:

It's a very short shot, but it quick to do and also great trying a different rig and a jump I never did. I really enjoyed trying out this different rig and still have to explore it more, since I didn't use everything it offers :-)