Vlad's Studio Practice: Potential & Limitations 1

How 2D rigs function -a reference picture I was researching

Considering that I'm going for a multimedia blend of techniques disregarding stop-motion (except for minor details), I might step into many limitations for this module. One of them is 2D rigging, which is something I haven't done before but understand the conventions of. With my partner Jay having used the technique for a while, I considered I should use it to add a new perspective of 2D animation to my arsenal (taking into account the classic 2D I did for "The Other Side" module last year). Being told that Duik is a really nifty and adequate plugin for After Effects, I started doing research on its practicality and functionality - practical and visual research. It was quite a coincidence that seminars on the puppet tool and duik are round the corner, hence they will solidify my self-deducted research even more. Being a visual stimulus student, I watched several tutorials on duik and the effects of it, and what I found out was that it incorporates the puppet pins that come in default with After Effects, and along with last year's tutorials I jotted down the main elements that work round the functionality of duik. However, there are many ways one can composite a 2D rig, where I found that the most effectively professional way is to use separate layers of every movable body part within Illustrator first, and then import all of it into After Effects for rigging and direct animation. Furthermore, by linking pins to new controls made by Duik the inverse kinematic effect can be achieved with anchor points through connecting pins. In other words, a final character rig with sufficient anchor points and controllers at the end of each main part is much more versatile than just a normal puppet tool rig. I feel that with the puppet tool the dynamic is limited because there is no hierarchies in pin points, which may distort the character. Even so, the rest of the pins follow the main anchor point which calls for an easy yet flexible manipulation of a character. The potentials of this magnificent rig tool is the smoothness in the movement of the character without separately drawing every frame which will induce line boil (which sometime is needed as an aesthetic effect, and sometimes not).

I then tried to to a test rig of my character's face (rough, without the correct colors) in order to get a grasp of how duik's bone system works. Unfortunately, I got in a bit of a jam where the puppet pins distorted the image solely because the names of the two different set of pins (those for the jaw and those for the upper head) had the same name. However, after resolving this issue, I got the jist of how duik functions and am fairly confident that I will be able to tame it for my Character & Narrative animation.