Hii I’m a student trying to improve an ostrich rig that I’ll be using in an upcoming creature animation course. The neck currently feels very difficult to pose and animate. In the attached screen recording, you can see the behavior I’m struggling with. The controls technically work, but getting clean neck poses requires significantly more effort than expected, and the motion often feels unpredictable.
I’m hoping to identify what rigging approach was used here and whether some common solutions or improvements could make the neck more “animator-friendly”. I’m not the original creator of the rig. It was created by my professor, who gave me permission to check and potentially improve it for her classes (witch im gonna take eventually, so it’ll make my life easier too).
Any insight into likely causes or recommended approaches would be greatly appreciated.
You can make a neck with that many controls, but animators will hate you .
Neck usually that long i would say a maximum of 3 controls, base middle and head.
For the base and the head you can use 2 additional “tangent” controls to help you shape the curvature of the nubs curve (so not on the curve itself).
infact, i think you can all together not touch the base control itself (unless its only rotations) and if you are smart with the rest, you should be able pretty much to move the head, and have the neck follow somewhat realistically to what an ostrich should do.
so to recap :
base —→ base handle middle headhandle←—–Head
the base its attached to the chest , middle can also follow in the middle between head and base, but could be weighted to either , or stay still.. then the head would do most of the work, with the head handle helping to shape the attachment to the head base.
Oh..and for the love of animators, always orient the controls to the world, so they align in a way that is animateable.
you could turn the neck into an IK spring to drive the top of the neck (either using the ik spring or using a double rp solver) and add togglable vis tangents between each segment. in doing so you introduce 2 PVs though, which can be a hassle for basic animations.
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