Having said that, RubberHose isn’t for the technical animator. RubberHose has no way to deal with spines, wings, the constraint systems that are required for tails, tools for rigging the face of a character, and other rigging tools that you would be accustom to elsewhere.Īdam admittedly notes on his site that RubberHose isn’t the ultimate character animation system, nor is it meant to have as many features as other systems. It is meant to take the grief out of character setup and animation. There are also no tools in the suite that will allow you to rig any other part of the character other than limbs. There are some controls that will allow you to choose between a soft arc bending limb versus a hard joint, but there are no controls for where that angled joint will be in the limb.
In fact the RubberHose tools for Ae do not work on joints or IK at all. There are no tools for dealing with standard rigging tasks such joints, IK or heel-to-ball foot rolls, which are all important for character animation. RubberHose only provides a preset “limb” that you can then customize towards your character. RubberHose is Not a True Rigging Toolset for After EffectsĪlthough RubberHose will allow you to create characters without having to worry about the standard and traditional rigging techniques, it is not a rigging toolset. The heart of RubberHose lies in the Hose Group, which gives you a set of two controllers and a Hose Layer that all work together. All movement and animation is live, calculated with expressions on every frame, with no baked keyframes. This is a great way to add things like feet, hands, etc to the initial RubberHose limb. You can even customize the look of the length of hose itself, as it is just a shape layer path. You can even easily parent other elements to the preset line. You can control things like how you want the length of line to bend, and in which direction. RubberHose creates a bendable, stretchable line, that is pre-rigged in After Effects for you to work with. Instead of providing rigging tools that will allow you to rig your own artwork, RubberHose takes a different approach.
While there are other more robust tools available for rigging characters, such as (the free) Duik tools for After Effects, RubberHose offers a simple take on animating character limbs by way of a preset system. IF you are looking for an easier way to quickly create characters to animate, then RubberHose looks to be the tool for you. RubberHose offers a unique tool that will create a bending and stretching limb for your character work in Ae. RubberHose looks to be poised for a release soon, with Battle Axe taking pre-orders for the After Effects script.īuilt specifically for handling the frustrating parts of animation Recently, more information has surfaced with a new site.
Adam Plouff’s Battle Axe company has been sneaking little tidbits for its new After Effects tool for creating bending and stretching limbs for character animation in After Effects.