#2D rig

[saturnjartt]

Expression test with a rig of Izuku Midoriya I built!!! Sadly, there is no turnaround for him yet, lol! School currently takes priority, but it's good work for showing my rigging capabilities! 🎉 (Manga readers, sorry if you got jumpscared by the last expression, LMAO.)

[nobylu]

RIGGING PROGESS: head corners achieved! 🎊🎉 We've got a Vbridger face, parallaxed teeth, parallaxed eyes, brow bone feature that changes shape in response to the eyebrow going up and down, a complex nose made with ✨10 total parts✨, and the nose shadow near the top changes shape in response to the eyebrow position and shape! AND SHOULD I MENTION THAT HALF OF THESE FEATURES WONT SHOW UNLESS THE MODEL IS BALD AND HAS MOTIVATED THE INCLUSION OF THE PLAN TO MAKE A BALD TOGGLE. I MIGHT BE STUPID BUT IM SO GOOD AT WHAT I DO.

[oneofthepowerful]

February 10th 2024 - Blog 2

Roughly every week or so, I would like to share some behind the scene progress of my series One of the Powerful, as it has been going through some developments, which we shall be discussing starting with this blog.

Rigging

After hand drawing two, over 10 minute animatic episodes. While storyboarding Episode 3 (which will be heavily action focused) I began thinking about how I could save time drawing as I noticed each episode taking longer and longer to make due to me being a one-man animation team. One of these ideas was creating 2D puppet rigs, that could allow me to pose characters like an action figure. And since I learned how to use control points to rig hair strands in Clip Studio Paint, I thought I could settle with that. As yes, it saves time, however since the program is very limited when it comes to puppet animation, being more of an illustration and frame by frame 2D animation software, I felt like there could be a better way to do what I felt would be best for this series.

I proceeded to study a few cartoons that I noticed used 2D rigged puppet animation, and looked into the software that some of the shows were made in. One that really interested me was Toon Boom Harmony, I saw that some people were able to give the appearance that a character is 3D by using controls even though it was all 2D, like this. I knew I wanted to learn something like this for my series, being able to pose a character’s head in different angles with some adjustment here and there would save so much time!! However, Toon Boom is WAYYY out of my budget sadly, but then I saw that Blender Grease Pencil and its rigging tools could give me a very similar if not the exact same result:

I’ve used Blender in the past, however only for creating basic camera movements for some of my animations. I had made a donut a couple of years ago but that was just about my experience with the program, my knowledge with Blender is very much limited. However, I was dedicated to try and give this whole rigging idea a chance so I proceeded to watch some tutorials to learn not only 2D rigging, but also Blender’s Grease Pencil, due to it being able to draw with vectors. Over a month later, I thought I’d share my progress:

After learning how to rig an eye, mouth and eyebrow to understand the basics of rigging; I noticed just how time consuming and tedious the whole process is, there is a lot of steps and A LOT of trial and error as anything can go wrong, it can take multiple rigging attempts to get the result you are after. But once you finish a rig, it’s such a rewarding time saver in the long run!

Once I understood the basics of rigging, for the past few weeks I have been chipping away at a 2D rig head turn, following this tutorial series! Using Hoshi as a test, since I thought he would be the easiest out of the main cast to rig, and well… that was until I was drawing out and rigging his hair - I had to really think about how each strand was all layering on top of one another and it was extremely time consuming, however I have got it mostly working now!

Currently, all of Hoshi’s facial features are rigged, this past week or so I’ve been rigging his mouth using what I learned rigging the last one. And it’s decent -but like most of the rig, it needs more refinement, being all a bit unpolished. I have also been having a lot of trouble rigging his lips, as they don’t deform the same way as the mouth rig, causing me having to place the lips manually, every time I change the mouth pose - which is a pain, so I’ve been trying to get it working with little luck at the time of writing. I also need to add in proper controls for the rig to make it more easier to animate, which will be done once everything is rigged and working as it should.

Down below, are some expression tests I did with Hoshi's rig, keep in mind these are all still a work in progress as I mentioned the rig is quite unpolished, however I’d love to hear your thoughts on it!! ^^

Concepts

While working on the rig, I have been making some minor rewrites, like adding more depth to events and characters in the story of OotP - which at this point in time I cannot speak much on due to heavy spoilers. However, Season 1 may end quite differently than originally planned, the ending being more polished and more organically linking things up, instead of things just coincidently happening. This all leading into season 2 more smoothly! ;)

Since I’ve been rigging, I’ve been thinking about character design a lot and thought since Episode 1 and 2 are likely going to be remade using 2D puppets for consistency sake. I’ve been wanting to slightly update some character designs, as I’ve barely changed the main casts' civilian designs since 2021 if memory serves me right, and there is somethings I want to change more with Cassidy and Hoshi’s designs - Erin’s design is fine for the time being, but I will change a few minor things like simplify their hair slightly for rigging, however their design changes will come up at a later date.

With Cassidy since she is based off a lion, I had her hair be in a braid to sorta resemble a lion tail.

However, for her new civilian design I’m considering having her hair more curly and bushy to fit her more happy, chaotic, bubbly personality, and to have it now sort of look like a lion’s mane? Then when she goes into her Powerful State (where a Powerful, someone who has magic, transforms to use their full abilities) I will have her hair transform in a long braid like before! Imagining the transformation for that is super fun!! 😀

I am also considering changing her outfit a little to be more casual and to have it easier to rig? I think changing her colour scheme to fit more with her blonde hair and the whole lion resemblance would be cool, however I might leave that for her powerful state outfit? I’m still figuring out her outfit, but I like the bright colours of the middle illustration (down below) as it fits her loud, outgoing personality!!

Also did you know that once a Powerful’s magic awakens (this can happen from when they are a child, like Erin’s case, or when they are a teen like Hoshi) it can sometimes alter their appearance when in their civilian form or "disguise", most commonly their hair. For an example, Cassidy used to have dark hair, however once her magic awakened, her hair changed to blonde. However everyone in this world, Powerless or not can be born with any hair colour, or people can choose to dye it. :D

Onto Hoshi, I have drawn some expression tests, being reference for the rig!

While working on Cassidy’s redesign sketches I thought I’d tweak Hoshi’s outfit a little as well. Without spoiling much, Hoshi wants to become as unnoticeable as possible, like he doesn’t exist (at least in his civilian design). When I designed Hoshi a few years back, I didn’t really flesh out his past or motivations all that much. So now looking at his current design, the contrasting colours of red and green could symbolise his messed up mental and physical state, but I’m not sure how much it really fits him outside of that, and I think the colours also stand out a bit too much for what Hoshi wants. So I’ve been thinking of toning his outfit's colour palette down a bit. I still don’t know if I will get rid of his red jacket as that has stuck with him since the very start back in 2020:

For rigging, you really want to avoid placing details on joints, and I knew that Hoshi’s knee ripped jeans would most likely make things quite complicated, so I am going to also play around with different designs for that in the near future!!

Down below are a couple of colour variations of a sketch from a potential updated Hoshi design:

I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on this!! I hope these blogs provide more insight on the progress of the series behind the episodes!!

Thank you all very much for reading! ^^

[crevettolart]

I rigged a few characters for Moving Out 2's trailer!! It was super fun, really loved it ❤️

[lynnthefigs]

My process of making a Toonboom rig! I made it 3D so I can just trace it once it's back on Toonboom (which I think is also practical for perspective accuracy)

I PRESENT YA'LL YEPPI. An autistic cat 🐈‍⬛ 📦

[stereodecor]

I animate and rig 2D characters and illustrations in Moho since 2019 and will be happy to create for you a custom Moho RIG based on your design so you will be able to animate your character exactly the way you want: move and stretch limbs to make gestures and walks, turn the body and the head up to 360 degrees, lip-synch (talk), express lively emotions with custom facial features control. Moho is the right choice when you need a software to quickly and effectively animate cutout puppets for children's cartoons, marketing and music videos. Moho's powerful arsenal of drawing and rigging tools allows to create sophisticated and powerful 2D character RIGS that are easy and intuitive to use by animators.

[karmatheanimator]

finally finished the turnaround of my rig~! now to test it out again

[egophiliac]

I love your unhinged energy of your comics it's just *chef's kiss"

I wanna ask how you rig your chibi characters if you use a program or an app ಥ⁠‿⁠ಥ

thanks! 💚💜💚

I use Spine (professional version)! I'm pretty sure it's the same program the Twst devs use for the chibis; I decided to try reverse-engineering 'em basically because my license was just sitting around gathering dust, and I thought it'd be fun practice (this was before I tried to rig Meleanor's cape). it is an industry-standard program and, unfortunately, is priced accordingly, so it's a bit expensive if you're not planning on using it professionally -- there is a free trial, though I think you can't save/export anything in it? BUT it is truly excellent and can do a ton of super cool stuff, plus is genuinely just fun to mess around in, so I 10000% recommend it to anyone who is serious about getting into 2D rigging!

behold...the BONES...Najma and her billion discrete tassels...don't pay attention to all the extra bones from my desperate attempts to control Meleanor's meshes

[taikk0]

Animation tests of my Pomni Rig!! She is very very unfinished.. but at least some parts are

[apollinaresart]

MY THESIS IS HERE 🎉🎉🎉

My undergrad thesis, "Jello Shot", is now out on YouTube! It's had a solid festival run and now it's time to throw it at the algorithm and hope for the best, so please interact with it - I spent 8 months on this thing!

[heilos]

First PNGtuber puppet rig test using her profile view :D She's got a few mistakes and some stuff to smooth out that I only noticed after I exported the gif, but i'll fix those later. I have so many dinosaur related animations I wanna do with her.

[fadedleara]

Been working on a Duramboros model (my fav monster from Monster Hunter <3) and here's a walk animation! Drawn, rigged and animated by myself in Spine!

[crevettolart]

Wasn't expecting to work on a short for Kellogg's lol

Anyway, I rigged this little dude! You can watch the short here:

[snickerzanddoodlez]

Showing off my Toonsquid Dimentio rig! Audio is from Gravity Falls!

The rig was made tracing an official graphic from the game, but was properly made and animated by yours truly!

[eryanlainfa]

Just felt like coloring the modelsheet

Uh, did you see that-

[arkarti]

That's how it went right? 👀

Tiktok | Youtube