Character & Narrative- Study Task 4 - Doing DUIK

Doing DUIK

DUIK is a software free to use for After Effects. It is much like the puppet tool but with proper boning tools that can be added so the bending of the joints isn't as unrealistic. I really like how this tool makes animating faster and easier than if it were to be hand drawn digitally like i've mainly done in the past. Although the set up of this character was extremely difficult. As she doesn't have legs and there is only one arm, it meant that when setting up the mechanics, it caused a few issues.

Here is the first angle of my character that i was going to use, as she was front on, I thought that this would make setting up her bones it would be easiest. But I changed my mind when i realised the brief wanted to show a character doing something or having more story to it. So if they were walking, it had to be walking somewhere. This was when I decided to do the side angle.

This is how the character was cut up. She was cut into Head, Torso, Arm and Skirt. This meant that she could have different components moving without her looking too flat. The character on the left, is what she looks like when placing the layers in the correct places so she looks like one whole body again. 

The headstone is what she will be walking towards as it creates more context/ story to the animation.

This was just to show that the pieces slightly overlap, meaning she can have more exaggerated movements without raw edges and the background showing through her.

 Here she is set up with the boning, this was the real struggle for me personally and it took me ages with many failed attempts before asking a fellow peer for help, he showed me how to set her up and how to join the pieces so when her neck moved, her head followed and when her hips moved, her skirt followed. This really helped and let me understand more on the boning.

The issue and difficulty i was finding with this character was that the auto rig needs to find all the bones in a normal human, as she only has a skirt and one arm it meant it had to be done manually which was really hard to grasp.

 This is when she is all set up. After animating her to move the correct distance, I pulled her across to Premier so that sound could be added and she could be rendered out properly as it needed to be turned into an image sequence after, After Effects.

This is the final animation. Overall i do like the overall effect but this is not the best digital animation that i have created, but as it took so long to set up, I couldn't let it eat into more of the time i needed for the main production. I would like to use this software for another project as it had a nice movement that could be created. Although next time the character created will have the proper bones needed so the rig can be set up correctly. This would save me a lot of time as it would be automatically added to the character.