Study Task 4: Doing DUIK

When I was in Manchester for the Manchester Animation Festival, I drew a lot of birds for no particular reason. I particularly liked this pigeon character I circled in red so I decided to make a rig based on him. 

I stylised of the pigeon that I made earlier by playing around with shapes because I want to make a good, presentable vector asset for the study task. I choose to do a 3/4 front view of the character because some of the good DUIK-rigged characters are made in such manner. It is more functional as all the features of the character are visible.

  

I made an asset on Adobe Illustrator, and separate them into different layers so that I can rig it on After Effects.

Stoned Pigeon Asset

For the background, I found a stock image online, copied it two times and polish it on Photoshop as the animation is going to be looped.

Background

Rigging steps and considerations:

• Do manual rig rather than auto rig because you'll have more freedom with the naming conventions.
• Start pinning the puppet pin from the bottom of the parts you're rigging because DUIK rigs works in inverse kinematic, also the control must be placed at the tip of the limbs instead of the joints.
• Create all the bones on the puppet pins accordingly, from the top list to the bottom, and parent each of them to the bone layer above them. 
• When all the bones are set and parented, create controls on the lowest puppet pin at each of the limbs. i.e: the hands for the arms, and the feet for the legs. As for the body, put controls on the pelvis, and put another individual control for the head if you want it to bobs as the character moves.
• To create the IK: organise the layers so that each of the controls is on top the bone layers of each of the segments. Afterwards, select the control and the bone layers in descending order and press the IK, choose 2-layers for most of the case, and DUIK will simply create it for you.
• If the limbs twisted when the IK is applied, there might be something wrong with the bones. In case that happens, save a backup project before touching DUIK, and a new separate one once you've placed the bones, so that when you failed you don't have to start afresh.

I don't really bother to polish up the animation as the transitions between loops are still jagged because this is just a simple study task, and I am quite satisfied with the outcome as I managed to put up an audio for the animation.

The outcome:

Pigeon Walkcycle

from Brenda Christie Muliawan on Vimeo.