Is it possible to have a hotkey make the character stand sideways?

Question

I know the answer is yes, but there is more to my question:

My character has puppet arms stapled from the shoulders, so for the character to stand side on, both shoulders would have to come closer together.

Is that even possible?

My first instinct was to have it work frame by frame, giving the character maybe 20 different pairs of arms to tween from one to the other. However, those arms wouldn't know they're the same arm, so wouldn't behave as one.

My next thought was maybe there was a way of just moving the shoulders, but I couldn't think of a way.

The only way I can think of, is if I were to animate the entire body turning on its side as a fixed animation, and have the arms turn from a preset resting position, however that is a lot of work for very small payoff.

Is there any other approaches?

oksamurai · Accepted Answer

One other idea: If you dig into the tutorial the way they did this for Andrew and Dr. Funkenstein was just to have new separate arms for each body position. If I remember correctly, some arms are draggable while others are key-triggered to only show something specific (like playing the keytar). I believe there was a little practical skewing and positioning in the original file to give it more of a realistic turn effect.

KJerryK · Answer

The easiest way I've found to do this is to drag the scene into After Effects, make a 3d comp, and then rotate the puppet along the y-axis. The face, shoulders, mouth all look pretty good so long as the rotation doesn't get too close to 90 degrees. I can post an example if you like.

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