This was easily the most complicated rig I made while I was at SCAD. Sunny approached me about this rig and said that he wanted something that really went all out for his thesis film. I started by making a lite animation rig so that the animation team on the project could get immediately to work. I also added a custom UI that loaded through a rig Icon. Custom tools and features of the rig were added to meet the requests of the animation team. Then Dynamic Ears were added to the head to allow for automatic secondary action. Animal legs were simulated through the use of the springIK solver, a second chain was set to follow the IK that could provide adjustments to the leg if necessary for the shot. The Rig was then split so that the animators would have something lite and fast to work with and the deformation rig wouldn't get in their way. The base of the deformation rig is the new maya muscle, the muscles were built from nurbs objects and point constrained to helper bones to ensure that everything observed something akin to proper kinesiology. As if that wasn't enough Several layers of clothing are in the process of being added to the rig. They range anything from wrap deformers to full on cloth simulation, while looking at the deformation tests take note separate pieces of cloth are all a different color. Displacements have also been added to the final render rig, hair and fur for the boys head and legs still to be added before the final version of the rig see's the renderfarm.
Mountain Climber
Models: Ahren Wert
Pending a different experiment I used this character for an exercise in pose space deformation. While the previous technique allowed me to make drastic changes to the animation rig. The characters design was boxy cartoon anatomy, and still left much to be desired in the way of shoulder deformation. so I tried out a couple different solutions to sculpt/add blendshapes using pose space deformation.
Mr. Mystery
Responsible for entire shot
Mr. Mystery is a character from a short I have been working on. he is entirely composed in Houdini. I wanted to try something that would free me from a standard animation pipeline. I call it Multi-phase rigging because that's exactly what happens. I rig the character as usual, I then animate him pretending that his arms are able to fly off into space or whatever. Then the animation is geometry cached, and through the manipulation of previously created vertex groups I can remove, re-rig, or swap those parts of the body allowing me to re-purpose them. The example shown here was quite simple, but I hope that upon finishing the film that I could use the same process to change parts of the model into anything( like fluid simulation or even other models).
Bremen Town Musicians
Models: Ahren Wert, Hadi Ibezri
This was a fun project that is still waiting to be finished. The idea was to create several animal whistles that would ride on each others back. Each rig can be connected to the main pile or operated separately through the use of lots of crazy constraints. Every character has also been given a joint based facial setup allowing the animators total freedom in placement and animation. Donkey's wheels have been set up to sag where they touch the ground and through the rig controls can be squashed. stretched, turned, or twisted to fit the whimsical situation the characters find themselves in.
