Thin Animation Test

3D Model

A test of various settings for animating thin things. From left to right, here was my process. 1. Create outline, solidify, rig, parent with automatic weights. Really hard to make it look good. Lots of time spent weight painting and lots of animation errors. 2. Same as above but I deleted the back side faces and did not redo the auto wieghting. Still lots of animation errors but better. 3. Deleted backside faces of the first one, then reparented with auto weights. Much better but have to make sure al transforms are applied before reparenting the duplicate. Also the object is single sided. No good for Unity and can see the “eyes” from both sides. 4. Same as above but with solidify applied after weighting. Seems perfect. Just had to get rid of the “eyes” on the backside.

Seems the best way to do bone animations on thin things is to make them as a single sided object first, then rig and weight, then solidify it. Also make sure to add extra polys around the bendy bits and put them into t-pose.