I've used spring magic a ton and what I'd do for top-tier results is hand animate the first base tail bone, then run spring magic on the next one or two bones, then add a layer and to bring in sway and curls, and then run spring magic on the next one or two bones, adjust, repeat till I get to the end of the tail. This is all to prevent it from zeroing back out to the start pose throughout the animation. I feel like I keep seeing new tail tools, but I often can't get them to work like old reliable spring magic.
You and I define 'rough' in very different ways but nonetheless I really do appreciate these tutorials. Fundamentals practice in animation is great and all but no-one ever gives you a potential solution for a specific problem when it comes down to it, so it's nice to be able to see how someone else might approach a problem.
Glad you found it helpful! I think it's important to present tools like this that can speed up the process, especially when a deadline is looming, and as much as you'd want to, completely hand animating a tail just isn't possible.
That's great. This explanation helped me a lot. I'm a junior game animator. I was working on it before 3ds max, and I recently moved to Maya. I've heard a lot from before that Maya is much more detailed and easier to perform high-quality work than Max. However, it was clear that there was a limit to recognizing it alone, and I didn't realize it. Now I think I can listen to your explanation and try to produce much faster, simpler, and better quality animations in Maya. I came to this channel after watching your bear owl monster animation. I've watched the clip every day for the last month.Those 5 seconds are a great work. Thank you for uploading the video.
That is really awesome to hear! :) I'm glad you found it helpful! Yeah, because Maya is a more widely used program for animation there are a lot more tools like this that are developed for it.
This is a wonderful tutorial! What I noticed, however, is that you're missing the new "Chain (nParticle)" simulation mode. I just realized it's a bit 'oopsie' on my end, as I'm not updating brodynamics.cfg config file if you're updating from an older version to enable it. So, to enable this mode if you updated from an older version, please, remove BroTools\config\brodynamics.cfg file, it will be recreated on next run and should enable this new mode. I will make sure to fix it in the next release on my end.
Great video! It'd be great to also see your approach if you had to animate the tail manually too, in case you don't have access to those tools at a studio or scripts stop working. Like do you animate the tail as a whole per pose, or do one control at a time, or segments at a time?
Yeah for sure, will probably cover that in another video. This method is definitely not to take place of animating the tail traditionally, especially when you need very specific tail animation. Typically when I animate the tail I do it as a whole, creating all the main poses, and slowly adding more detail. Don't start working one control at a time unless I'm getting into more polish.
Hey Mark, awesome video and tutorial! I have a question about LMspring2 - does the chest have to be in IK to run the translation sim? I just tried it on a chest control on my character but it didn't do anything apart from create an animation layer with flat curves. Thanks :)
