Raiden Blade Wipe
At first glance it might appear that the character is cutting his own arm, but he is actually sliding the dull side of the katana along his arm, not the edge.
Unfortunately this pose turned out to be much more difficult to achieve than I anticipated, and I was unable to complete the full pose. What I did complete is shown in the GIF below.
I found manipulating the rig to be confusing and time consuming: some of it was from me not being observant enough -- like not realizing that the footprints on the ground were used to position the feet -- but other things I simply could not find an easy way to manipulate. The arms and fingers were especially difficult. clicking the little colored lines on the lower arms and fingers wouldn't select the part of the rig that actually manipulates those joints, like one would expect, so I had to go into the outliner and find each of these joints. The controls for some of these were buried within layers upon layers upon layers of hierarchy in the outliner, and it was not immediately apparent which elements I was even looking for, so finding all those joints took a lot of time. On top of that, just manipulating the pose of the fingers involves adjusting 15 different joints -- 3 per finger -- and then setting keyframes for all of them.
I also had a great deal of trouble getting the katana to slide properly. I had it parented to the wrist originally, which worked fine for the first part of the pose, but for the second part I couldn't for the life of me get the arm to slide all the way to the right while holding the katana straight and steady. At best I got it to look like he was trying saw his own arm off, or play it like a fiddle. So, as I usually do when working with something I'm inexperienced with, I came up with a complex workaround. Someone more familiar with Maya could probably solve this issue quickly and easily, but I am not such a person, so I needed to get a little more creative.
After the katana comes to rest in the crook of lowman's arm, it turns invisible, and a second katana in the exact same position becomes visible at the same time. This second katana, however, is not parented to anything. I then set keyframes of the katana sliding exactly how I wanted, and then matched the arm up to the handle at various times and set keyframes for each of the arm joints at those times. After a bit of fine tuning, I finally got the first part of the pose to look reasonably accurate to the original. So, despite only being a few seconds of animation, this actually took me hours to do, and I didn't even have time to attempt the rest of the pose. The second half of the pose requires even more animation and precision, so I can only imagine how long it would have taken me to complete.
