The Void Animation Project: Making My Character's Arm Extend

So at this point in the animation process we had approached two obstacles that initially I saw as massive but turned out to not be so complicated. One of them was the obstacle of inserting Live Action Footage into our animation, the second was making 54's arm extend a great deal. It was always intended that the reason why 1 would lose his temper would be because 54 loses control of his limbs (due to the intentional poor quality of his character modelling).

Partially inspired again by the Homer3 episode of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror…

So the scene in which his arm extends and he accidentally knocks everything off the grid is completely essential so we could not leave it out and we had to do a good job with it.

I and the task of making the 54 model actually be able to extend his arm. Initially I thought I would need to keep 54 in a static position and create a new polygon in the shape of his arm and just extent that, keeping the UV map. But tutor Mat showed me a far easier way of completing this task by simply creating a blend shape. The technique was enforced by duplicating the mesh of my static character and extending the arm of this new duplicate (this was easy because it was not attached to any IK handles or bonded to any controls), then I had to select them both and hit blend shape. I could then access this new blend shape on the controls tab under 'arm extend' which allowed me to increase and decrease the length of the arm at will.

It took me a while to get the model looking how I wanted it to and often I would try to increase the arm length and then the whole side of the character's body would end up getting dragged with it. Eventually we fixed the problem and I was very happy with the results…

INSERT PICTURE OF 54 ARM EXTENDED