Rigging and the Importance of Clavicles

I stumbled upon some old(ish) work! Thought I'd share. This is from around October/November 2016.

So this here animation is old! And not that great. For this project I had to design, model, and rig my own characters, and then make a few animations, as one would for a typical game character - a walk cycle, a jump, an idle... I thought, for an idle, I could just have my character hear a noise, then shrug it off. That works.

Buut turns out I made quite a mistake during rigging. I forgot why (I know I had a reason back then!), I thought, hey, this character doesn't need a clavicle. He barely has shoulders!

Turns out it's rather hard to animate a character shrugging when he doesn't have clavicles.

Haaahah. Oops. :) Lesson learned!

Here's an animation I thought was a bit more fun, just to finish it off with something less bad. This animation was triggered when hitting a certain key.