Hey so I've seen that there is a '3D thread' for all sort of 3D work, so I thought I would make one for animation! Whether its 3D or 2D it doesn't matter. If you are a 2D artists -post your gifs! 3D artists? You can post your rigs and gifs of your animations. You could even post up your images and ask for help troubleshooting whatever animation related problem you are currently stuck on. (This doesn't look "right", how should I rig this? etc).
I will start of! I have just finished rigging the deer for my personal project game. I have never rigged a quadruped before, so I just looked up some images of dogs doing random things (You get more results for "sitting dog" than you do for "sitting deer"
) and tried to study the way their joint bend (Those back legs are strange as hell). I tried to find some good "low poly quadruped rig" examples but I had no luck - just a whole bunch of high res horses
Luckily, in my game everything is unlit and the texture does all the shading. This means I can get away with some joints creating a "broken" mesh when they deform, as long as its not too severe. This was really huge because I am working at a low poly level, and don't have many verts to work with.
So first, here is the mesh with the final rig on it
I had with one of my joints. The issue was with the front legs of the deer. When it was bent sharply (ie sitting) the back side of the joint would collapse and the joint would become tiny.
rig:
I needed a way to keep that section 'inflated', so what I did was create another 'bone' at the knee pointing backwards. I assigned the collapsing verts to that knee and made it so that that knee maintained its offset with the lower-leg bone. Heres the rig:
And the result:
not very pretty, but thats OK. Like i mentioned before, my game is unlit, so even though the mesh looks funny when lit, it'll just be colored a flat color in game. It'll look like it has volume, and thats enough!
Here it is in game: