Before you commit to animation timing, do a quick “rig pre-flight” so your stylised character doesn’t fall apart the moment you hit play. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s catching the common rigging failure modes while they’re still cheap to fix.
This checklist is built for stylised humanoids where proportions and shapes often push rigs into edge cases: oversized hands, short legs, big heads, thick torsos, and exaggerated shoulders. Use it with Rig Lab for humanoid rigging from a T-pose or A-pose GLB, and with AnnoMotion Skeleton for fitting, refining, and exporting an engine-ready rig (or for generating sprite sheets if you’re going that route).
1) Proportions & pose: lock the baseline
Rigging issues often start as “it looked fine in the modelling viewport”, then show up as twist flips or foot sliding during animation. Start with proportions and the pose you’re using to rig.
-
Check the rig pose matches your character’s intent.
If your character is stylised with a slightly forward-lean stance, decide whether the rig should start neutral (for clean animation) or biased (for a more characterful default). Pick one and keep it consistent across characters that share an animation set. -
Confirm the limb lengths are plausible for your silhouettes.
A stylised character can have chunky arms and short forearms, but the elbow and knee markers still need to land where the joint bends in your final animation. If the elbow marker ends up “floating” between frames, you’ll feel it later. -
Verify the shoulder width and chest volume don’t force marker drift.
Thick torsos can cause the shoulder joint to sit too high or too far forward. If you notice the joint markers won’t sit cleanly on the anatomy, pause and adjust before you weight anything. -
Do a quick symmetry pass.
Stylised characters often rely on symmetry to read well. If one hip is slightly higher, or one wrist sits closer to the torso, you can still animate—but your idle/walk preview will reveal asymmetry immediately.
In practice: in Rig Lab, you can refine joint marker placement before skin weights are painted. In AnnoMotion Skeleton, you’ll fit the skeleton to your model and can re-check alignment before you invest time in animation.
2) Joint placement: prevent twist and hinge disasters
Once the skeleton is fitted, joint placement becomes your “physics for animation”. The most common mid-cycle breakages come from elbows and knees bending around the wrong axis, shoulders twisting unexpectedly, and wrists rotating in ways that shear the forearm.
Use this placement checklist:
-
Elbows and knees should hinge in the direction your mesh expects.
If your character’s elbow crease is on one side, the hinge should follow that. A mismatch doesn’t always look wrong in bind pose—it looks wrong when you bend during idle. -
Shoulders need clean collarbone spacing.
Stylised shoulders can be broad, which tempts you to place the shoulder joint too far out. If that happens, the upper arm will rotate around empty space and the deltoid shape will “orbit” during motion. -
Wrists should sit where the hand actually rotates.
If the wrist joint is too far into the forearm, the hand will lag behind motion. If it’s too far out, you’ll get a rubbery bend that looks like the hand is attached with a spring. -
Spine and pelvis should let your character breathe.
For stylised rigs, it’s tempting to keep the spine rigid. Don’t—at least ensure the spine joints are placed so minor curvature doesn’t collapse the torso into itself.
A useful sanity check: rotate each major joint through its first “comfortable” range (small bends for elbows/knees, slight rotation for shoulders/wrists) and watch for obvious mesh inversion or sudden volume loss. Fix placement before you move to weights.
3) Weight behaviour: watch deformation under stress
Skin weights are where most stylised rigs either become production-ready or fall apart. You don’t need to test every animation—just test the behaviours that cause visible failures.
Work through these checks:
-
Bend test for elbows and knees (mid-range, not max).
Bend to a mid angle and watch the forearm and shin. If the mesh collapses toward the joint or “balloons” away from it, your weights need refinement. -
Twist test for upper arms and thighs.
Twist the bone slightly (even a small rotation) and look for candy-wrapper effects. Stylised characters often have simplified geometry, so twist artefacts can be more obvious. -
Shoulder lift test for the torso connection.
Raise the arms slightly and observe the shoulder-to-chest area. If the torso skin pulls like it’s attached to the upper arm, you’ll see it immediately in walk cycles with arm swing. -
Hand and fingers: at least confirm the wrist.
Even if you don’t animate fingers yet, confirm the wrist deformation is stable. Many rigs look fine until the first time the character’s hand crosses the torso during locomotion. -
Feet and hips: prevent the “float then snap” pattern.
If your weight painting causes the foot mesh to drift off the ground plane during subtle movement, you’ll notice it when you preview idle and walk. Fix weights early so you don’t end up fighting foot locking later.
If you’re using Rig Lab, this is where the painted weights and previews you get in-browser matter. If you’re using AnnoMotion Skeleton, use the same idea: refine the fit and re-check deformation before exporting.
4) Idle and walk previews: catch breakage before keyframes
Animation failures are usually obvious once you see motion, not when you’re staring at a static pose. Your objective is to confirm that the rig survives the first cycle you’ll actually ship: idle and walk.
Do these previews as if you’re an animator, not a rigger:
-
Idle cycle stability.
Watch the head and torso for jitter, and watch elbows/knees for tiny shape pops. Stylised characters can exaggerate motion, so even small weight issues become obvious. -
Walk cycle foot behaviour.
Check for:- foot sliding (heel drifts during stance)
- toe collapse (mesh bends in an unnatural way)
- hip hitching (pelvis rises too much or too little)
- knee popping (knee joint changes angle abruptly)
-
Arm swing consistency.
Arms shouldn’t “clip” through the torso unexpectedly. If they do, it can be weight behaviour, joint placement, or both. -
Shoulder and neck follow-through.
Many stylised rigs use simplified torsos and heads. Ensure the neck doesn’t shear and the shoulders don’t detach visually from the torso during motion.
A quick workflow trick: preview idle and walk, then scrub frame-by-frame around the transitions—where the foot contacts, where the torso leans, where the arms cross the body. These are the frames where rig issues show up first.
5) Export sanity: verify what the engine will actually see
Even when a rig looks right in the editor, you can still lose fidelity on export if the rig isn’t consistent.
Before you ship animation work, do this final pass:
-
Confirm the exported rig is the one you tested.
It’s easy to export after a last-minute marker tweak. Make sure your exported version matches your preview checks. -
Use the engine preset that matches your target.
Rig Lab and AnnoMotion Skeleton provide engine presets for Unity, Godot, and Unreal. Pick the correct preset for your pipeline so you don’t debug “it’s fine here but broken there” later. -
If you’re doing 2D sprite output, re-check deformation first.
If you render out a sprite sheet from the rigged motion, any deformation artefacts become baked into your frames. It’s better to fix the rig before you generate sprite output.
Once your rig passes proportions, joint placement, weight behaviour, and idle/walk previews, you’re ready to animate with confidence.
Next step: open your character in Rig Lab or AnnoMotion Skeleton, run through the bend/twist and idle/walk preview checks above, then export and re-preview in your target engine scene before you start polishing keyframes.