I am very thankful that Mike knew exactly the way to set up how we wanted our characters to move, since he had worked out a way to do this in one of his previous work projects. He had went and put up a tutorial for this on BlackBoard and this post just covers me following those.
Tilt Controller
So the first thing to set up with this, was the tilting movement.
First you set up an armature with a bone to be the skin weight and then your other bones can control the shape (and you can change their appearance!). So, once u have a bone that is parented (with auto weights) to the model, in this case a cube, you can then set up a master control using a bone shaped like a circle empty. Then you duplicate bones out to each corner, changing their appearance to empty axis, and then you just apply a limit rotation to the axis of these so that they can only rotate around 90 degrees. These bones you parent opposite facing ones until it creates a chain, and you can copy these constraints over in the menu which is very cool.Then you set up another circle empty to be your tilt controller, and apply each bones copy rotation to it and voila, the cube tilts on its bottom.
Squash and Stretch/Deform
The squash and stretch was something that I was amazed by.
First, you add the Maintain Volume Constraint, this amazing tool that maintains the volume so you can squash and stretch really quickly. I had always wondered what the Custom Properties tab was, and I now know! So, you set up a custom property and rename this to S.S for Squash and Stretch, as well as changing the values to fit. Then the more complicated part, you select the cube and right click on the Z axis and create a Driver. Then set up a controller for this property, same as before duplicating a bone and changing it to a circle empty, anyway, you select this and right click the S.S value and Copy the path. Going back over to the Driver window with the cube u paste the path in and with that, you can control the squash and stretch from this value!
Then to make the deformations, you can just use Shape Keys! I had always wondered how they worked and again, I now know and can’t wait to use in future. First, you set up some more geometry on the cube and then you create 3 shape keys (one for the base, one for the stretch and one for the squash). For our stretch key we use proportional editing to squeeze in the centre, then for our squash we extrude edges inward to have this accordion like effect. Then we create Drivers for these, but this time we can jsut copy the same one as before with some adjustments (just making the squash key value to – since it will go the opposite way). Then it’s done!
I went ahead and tried the tilt rig on my previs model, and it actually works really well – there is a consistent issue I have where one side doesn’t conform to the rotation limit-but I can work around this so it is fine for now. I also messed up by not bringing the whole armature to the body, but it is just a practice so it is fine! I actually find rigging to be confusing but quite satisfying once you can get it to work. I also tried some practice animation with these, but they didn’t come out right as I still seem to fight against 3D software and animating, but I still have time to overcome these.
Overall, it was really cool to see more of what Blender has hidden away and I can’t wait to get better at 3D as a whole and improve my animation in it!