Breadbeard

I finally received Breadbeard on Friday and started animating with him straight away. I started the Sword pulling scene first because he is on his own in the scene and it meant I could get used to the rig. I am quite pleased with the results.

When I received the file he did not have his sword, so a quick email to Tom and I got the file. Obviously it wasn't to scale as you can tell from the image below:

I parented the Sword to his left hand to make moving the sword much easier. It also meant it stays firmly in Breadbeard's hand when he is pulling it up, and I only had to animate the angle so that it did not stab his other arm or body.

I do quite like his rig, although the facial controls for all of the characters do annoy me as I prefer to use Facial Controllers rather than Blend Shapes, purely for the fact that they are easy to see and all together, you can also see the different keyframes for each individual part on the timeslider instead of needing to open the Graph Editor if you change your mind.

Breadbeard also does not have a control for his jaw which the Guard has, which means I had to use the Lower Lip B.S. and the Neutral one, which was not good because it causes deformation to his lips and face if I try to open his mouth too far. I wanted to do this to make him look more menacing and angry, and also to look more in shock when the Guard shouts ‘Never’ and is aggressive with the claw.

On the other hand, I do like the expressions that I can create with Breadbeard as he has a lot of Blend Shapes for his eyebrows and it is easy to manipulate his eyelids to make him look angry.

Note: I have since found out that you can open the Jaw more using a joint in Xray mode - this will make my expressions even better :)