Review: Anna rig

Alimayo Arango explores the Anna rig on the Blender Market. Read more BlenderNation reviews here.

Introduction

The Anna rig is a cartoon style character rig that can be used to quickly and efficiently create animated scenes.

Description

The Anna rig is a rig from the CGCookie marketplace from creator Artell. The rig controls allow quick, varied deformations, throughout the characters body, face, and hair. It has an intuitive interface that allows this rig to be used with speed and efficiency.

Value for money

The Anna rig is a great price for what you get.When you compare this character rig with its advanced and varied controls to similar models being sold in other 3d marketplaces it is easy to see the value of this product.. The spline rigging and other included controls that allow you to easily manipulate the arms,legs, hips shoulders and face of this character rig are simply amazing.

Features

The Anna Rig includes:

• Arms and legs that have IK/FK switches, stretchable chains and an auto-stretch option.
• An advanced facial rigging setup with more than 50 controller such as eyelids, eyebrows, eye scale, jaw, teeth, tongue, nose, cheeks that inflate and more.
• A very flexible rig that has secondary deformers on each part of the body , for advanced posing of the character mesh.
• A dynamic hair and breast setup that can be turned on or off.
• Left and right bones axis that are mirrored to enable transform mirror in one click.
• A bone picker panel placed in a separate window to make the selection of bones easier .

Learning Curve

There is a learning curve when using this rig, as is to be expected as animation itself is a complicated process.This rig could have left out some of the more advanced controls for the price of simplicity however it seems that this rig was designed to give an extreme level of precision in being able to animate to a high degree the different parts of the character mesh.

User flexibility

A good character rig should provide an animator with the ability to make quality animations as fast and with as little difficulty as possible. This rig has separate body and facial controls that allow for controls to be hidden for ease of the animation process.

The flexibility of this character rig allows this rig to push well beyond what is capable of with the Rigify rig that is included with Blender particularly when it comes to this rigs ability to deform shapes in the arms, legs and other areas of the mesh body.

The Anna rig has IK/Fk snap,(IK/Inverse Kinematics-is often used as a solution for rigging a character's legs.Inverse Kinematics are very useful for working when a chain of armature bones needs to work against a non moving structure like the ground. An animator grabs and poses the end of an armature chain of bones and the rest of the bones follow suit. )(Forward Kinematics are useful for when you need a chain of armature bones to move in an arc like a arm throwing a baseball. To set up a pose a character the animator would set the location and rotation of an armature joint individually.)( The IK/FX snap allows you switch between Inverse kinematics and Forward Kinematics.) and stretching options setup.)

The facial controls are impressive in the fact that they allow you to have deep control over the characters facial deformation and expressions. For instance the rig provides controls for pupil and iris dilation. Very cool!

Setting up smiles, facial sneers, and cheek puffs animations as when someone is holding their breath are very easy to accomplish with this rig.

The author of this rig’s decision to prefer IK poles rather than the IK chain bone method of animation. This may cause some confusion initially among some users as this is different than the way Rigify controls which many people are accustomed to. For instance when posing the eyes of other character rigs often they aim the eyes toward what you want them to look at by moving an IK chain bone as a target. This model uses IK Poles for eye aiming instead.
The documentation included with this rig is clear and precise in telling you how to work with this rig.

Quality of results

With all the options and flexibility of the Anna rig it you can tell that the author Artell was very serious about providing a character rig that meets the desires and needs of a character animator.

To make a rig yourself that has this amount of detail would take an immense amount of time, and that is assuming you already understand how to rig a character model. To be able to buy a character model and rig as robust as this for the selling price is a dream.

I would recommend that someone who is interested in learning more about animation or an experienced animator that needs an advanced character rig should definitely check out this product.

Product specifications

• Author: Artell
• Product Page
• Price $40.00
• Created: February 3, 2015
• Last update: March 16, 2015
• Software Version Blender 2.7x

Product rating 9.0

This rig is ideal for the person who is aiming to make a Pixar-like level of animation. If you are such a person I highly recommend this character rig.

Ease of use:7
Content (model quality?):9
Documentation:8
Value for money:9
User ratings: