Character Pose Test: Mula-Anu Prototype

Dynamic Pose Test

A good way to test the functionality of your character model rig is to run it through a series of dynamic poses.

Making the poses silhouettes (or semi-silhouettes) helps test for strength.

This test will reveal a lot about the capability of your model rigs and give an early indication of how well they'll perform in production.

It's important to do this exercise early on i.e. as soon as you have a basic functioning rig.

I ran the prototype Mula-Anu character rig through this process and she didn't fair well.

The results of the test are shown below.

Fail

Although the poses are discernible, the rig was strained and I can see production problems down the road due to volume loss (but which can be compensated for) and unnatural deformations.

The poor performance in this test was one of the reasons I haven't taken this prototype rig forward into production. A new, more stylised, model is being created.

Note, the strange faceting (white highlights) on the silhouettes are because I used a non-deformable 'proxy rig' (I'll explain in a later post): the areas of white indicate where the most model deformation is likely to occur.

The poses were based on a great series of books called Poses for Artists by Justin R Martin.