Animating a DJ Crowd hands bouncing?

[Motoed-Hidden]

I have a project where I'm doing a DJ scene and wanted to have a bunch of hands raised in the foreground bouncing up and down. I was thinking it would be neat to do it in character animator so the arms would bend a little while the hands move. But I'm not sure that Animator can support multiple arm like objects moving?  It seems like Character Animator handles a humanoid like character really well, but not sure it works with non traditional characters?

Would a character with say 12 arms be possible?   Or would it be creating characters with hands raised and adding multiple characters to a single scene (is that possible?)

[alank99101739]

If you had a big blob for the body (back of peoples heads, people overlapping shoulder to shoulder ... or even just a big rectangle if off the bottom of the screen) then you can certainly attach multiple arms and put a dragger on each one. Its only things like Walk behavior that understands concepts like the body structure.

But a dragger on each arm would require a recording per arm. Certainly doable, but so many draggers could be... um... a drag.  You may be able to copy/paste a recording between arms (have not tried), but there are other funky things you can try. E.g. adjust the physics property so gravity goes up, not down. Put a dangle on each hand, so its dangling up, not down. Fiddle with gravity strength etc. Then put a dragger on the “mega-body” (off screen) and move it up and down a bit. You can put a bit of wind going as well with some randomness to get side to side action. Sticks in the arms to stop flexing other than at elbows etc. I think then one recording should be able to get all the arms waving around a bit In sync.

E.g. This blog post talked about something similar for poppies waving in the wind. (Ignore the butterfly.) Yours would be multiple arms instead of a flower, and moving to a beat, but should be possible. https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/02/04/butterflies-and-poppies/

[alank99101739]

Oh, there are new features not mentioned as well like “springiness” (or is it squishy ness?) of the body. A bit a subtle tweaking of that might help get a bit of bounce going as well. But the principle is really like doing hair, just dangling up instead of down, and the segments of hair just happen to be drawn as arms.

So just think of an upside down hairy monster crowd and you should be fine! ... ummm.