Character Performance – Waving

By October 19, 2014 May 10th, 2016 Creative Research

To get to grips with 3D animating I had a go at animating a character waving. I used the Mery rig which is a character with a Disney style aesthetic.

The animation was a simple wave just to learn the ropes of 3D animating. Each limb is controlled with a “control shape” which has attributes such as rotation and translation.

I added anticipation to the wave as the character moves her body outwards before the wave. I also added extra motion to the eyelids as she squints to see someone off-screen, presumably someone she is friendly with (hence the wave) and the smile following the squint.

I’m reasonably happy with this as a first attempt although there are some weird timing going on and there’s definitely room for a lot of tweaking and movement of other control shapes to add a more realistic movement to the character on the whole. I may or may not come back to this animation.

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