How should I rig this simple character ?

kiwia

Hello ! This is my first time posting so forgive me if I'm not posting in the right place.
I've been modelling this little octopus for some time, this is my first rigging a character, I plan on making a mobile game. I want to be able to export the mesh and armature to Unity. I made an IK rig following this tutorial. I watched some tutorials, they talked about IK and FK rig switching, I understood that FK works best to move the limb in an arc and you want to be able to switch between the two rigs.

I want to do really simple animations, the octopus won't be walking or anything, it'll spend most of the time floating in the air. There are a few animations I want to make, one where the character floats from left to right, in some sort of idle animation, and another one where it moves one of its front arms to show that it's interacting with something. The face is a single texture, I'd like to move the UVs of the texture inside Unity to change the expression.

My questions are : is the IK rig enough for what i plan on making ? If i have to make another rig, what would be the right way of setting up everything ?

Thank you for reading !

Video link of the gif :

https://streamable.com/momnp5
https://streamable.com/yaknte

Alex_J

if you have an IK rig setup already i'd just go straight to the animations and see if it makes for feasible workflow.

I mean if you have a handful of animations to do  that maybe amounts to like <50 hours of work, not sure that spending another 20 hours or more to make some additional rig features that might improve ergonomics slightly is worth the effort.

If you are trying to learn in general, sure do it all.

If I was animating, I expect I'd be using IK for the tenctacles mostly, but I think this largely depends on the prejudice of your animator. Maybe your animator thinks its sacrilege to not use FK for some reason. That's just to say, tools oftentimes have to fit the team rather than some arbitrary "best practice".

There are some pretty advanced toolsets out there which can more or less automated secondary animations, like tentacles waving, snakelike motions, etc, but again if you only have a small amount of animation to do, not sure its worth time to go after such things. If you were going to be animating this character over the course of like an animated tv series, yeah in that case you probably want the most efficient tooling.