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Cure - Advanced Skeleton 5

I spent a fair chunk of the day yesterday playing around with Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya and honestly, it's amazing. I wasn't sure how well it would work with my model because it is so low poly but I came out surprisingly well.


So Advanced Skeleton gives you the joints from a template and once they're all lined up you can build the controllers to see how it will move. Because you do all of this in stages, you can change and update the rig at any point. 


There are a few different methods to bind the skin and this is one of them, but in the end I didn't use the Skin Cage because it didn't seem necessary for my model.

Once the body rig was done I spent a LONG time trying to get the facial rig to work. I was clearly doing something wrong the first few times I tried it because it worked just fine when I sat down and worked through it step by step!



The skeleton also comes with pre-made walk cycles so I put my character into these to see how the deformation was working and really liked the outcome - even if Macho Walk is hilarious.




However, after I had this test I started to think about if this was really how my character might move considering she is a low poly model. So I added a filter in Premiere Pro called "Posterize Time" to see how a lower frame rate might look.


There isn't much difference at 18fps but at 12 there is notable difference and then even more so at 8. Although 4fps just looks like a slideshow. Again, more things to play about with and see what I like best.

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