Cerene's Blender Rig (Video) (Patreon)

Here's a little video preview of Cerene's new Blender rig (attachment can be downloaded below). No actual animation, as this is just a demonstration from our production coordinator, but you can get a peek at how well inverse kinematics (IK) works in Blender. We mentioned IK before as one of the advantages we'd have if we switched to Blender. It had always been a bit finnicky for us in Maya, but in Blender it just works.

Animators often use IK when they want to build an animation around the movement of the hands or feet. Here you can see that when we manipulate the hand, the shoulder and elbow joint follow within a range the rigger has setup. The alternate to this is forward kinematics, wherein you'd start by animating the shoulder and upper arm, then the forearm, then finally the hand. Sex animation uses a combinations of these types of animations, so having functional IK for our future animations will save us time. A lot of the movements we create focus on hip movement and secondary motion in particular, so with this Blender rig you can see moving the hip affects all surrounding body parts naturally. In Maya it would be disconnected and require counter animation.