Character Rigging

Barn Kittens

Soccer game with kittens

Maya, Photoshop, Unity3D

I modeled and rigged a kitten to play soccer. so my students could practice building animations for the unity state engine.

Mermaid

Prototype for An AR project.

Maya, Photoshop , Substance Painter, Arnold

Rigged so the tail can move like a fish or like a girl in a costume.

Patrick Henry crowd rig

Lobster Rig

Drivers

Viking game rig

Karl Rig

Karl is a super toon rig, I teach the basic humanoid rig so this was a opportunity to stretch my skills both figuratively and literately.

Full body controls with the rig able to be moved with or with out the feet following, the torso moving or the hips and shoulders moving independently

Space Switching the head to move and rotate independently or along with the Shoulders,or the body, or world, and the same with the eyes, which can move with the head or with the world space. plus multiple costumes on the the rig.

Karl Face

Fun Intuitive controls. the eye shapes automatically change with the eye movement, the eyes can be moved independently and the pupil texture can be easily modified.

I find being able to cheat the teeth a bit helpful when animating and the stretchy mustache really helped communicate the characters mood.

Karl Arms

Full stretchy arms with FK IK controls, as well as Toon arm controls to get rubber hose animation . The hands have automatic finger controls as well as FK fingers and IK fingers with two types of stretchy controls and pick up controls

Karl Legs

Full Stretchy Legs with FK IK controls, as well as toon controls for rubber hose animation. Heel toe animation slider, as well as toe controls and shoe removal .

If a character is going to move correctly it must be rigged correctly for the animator to intuitively find the controls they need and focus on getting the acting performance out of the character.

Eagle model by Rob Rowe

The eagle rig I did in Motion Builder and was quite challenging because it the wings need to work as wings and as hands. Including doing a flush fold to the body. I found it relativity easy to translate my Maya rigging technique into Motion builder and even do the fk-IK fingers that the lead animator wanted and meet the brief of having the wings work as hands and wings and fold up and lie flat on the body.

Wooden Artist Model

A quick FK-IK Game Rig for my animation class. I need to show them how animate properly with a good rig. I was going to hand out the Karl rig but then I thought some would want their animations on their reel. So I made the classic Wood model but with fingers. I also did it with a separate control and skin rig so they could rip it apart and study how to build a rig for games.

Face Capture

Set up the 52 blendshapes to test the face capture system in both Unity and Unreal.

Squeeballs rigs

I had twelve characters to build and rig, animate, so the challenge on this job was to see how efficiently I could do it.

This included custom shelf buttons and creating export scripts so that when a change request cam in I could make the changes in under 20 minutes and get the new version uploaded to the SVN. very late the project I was asked for a full body spin, no problem I all ways put an extra transform at the top of the rig hierarchy.

This cell merger rig was very challenging, as the inner section had to merge to the top of the outer cell wall and the outer part had to merge to the bottom of the cell. Came up with a series of Blend shaped nurbs of curves with the verts replaces with the spheres with there chemical bond and then had all of them aimed at series of locators that I then animated up to get them to flip and orient correctly into the new position.

Golf shoe rig, the job was to show off the company's Pod technology, I basically did a spider rig. The client made some late changes but do to my file set up they were minutes to change.

The project had 5 copies of the solider with different textures.

I have the pre texture department version here which I colour coded between the hard surfaces and soft surfaces to speed up the meeting with the supervisor. I has full FK-Ik switches and the ability to carry a weapon in one or both hands. I had some limits on the shoulders but the animators found it too restrictive, ever since I've tried avoid setting limits. I also developed a system to get the motion capture out of Filmbox (now motionbuilder) onto the rig using afew plug ins and a set of constraints. I also rigged the queen and the lead character that got normal rigs.

Patrick Henry crowd rig

I rigged the crowd members setting up a universal rig that we could turn on and off different hair, faces, and outfits. and then use different animation clips to efficiently keep the crowd alive

Modeling by Rob Rowe, Textureing by Nathain Winfrey, animation by Steve Vanseth

Lobster Rig

Needed a lobster for a scene, fun little guy to rig

This was a hard problem to solve the client need me to animate a skin disease the shot starts out with a horizontal line of cells creating skins cells that animate to the top of the screen then the line creating cels distorts but the skin cells must keep animation up to the top of the screen. How I solved it was I turned the camera upside down a nurbs surface with a bendshape to do the distortion then put a row of hairs on the surface so the hairs would come strait out of the surface at any angle as the surface bent and distorted, then droop down to the edge of the frame. Then I made a nurbs loft between each of the hairs and I animated the texture of the skin cells on the lofts.

Drivers

Drivers for my little driving game, currently, I have six drivers all with export scripts.

Car rig the wheels were atached to a path and rotated automaticly and the stearing wheel not only controled the wheels but the drives hands as well.

Little girl rig this is my test hack where I try out new rigging ideas, and keep my skills current.

book model by Raf Pimentel

Locking book Rig with flipping pages.

Viking game rig

Simple game rig designed for taking the students through the fundamentals of structuring game rigs for export to Unity using custom Mel scripts to bake the animation onto the skinned rig and then remove all the handy animation controllers. I'm finaly building a game for the eight pieces and the king.

Wolverine rig in 2001 we were pitching marvel on a direct to DVD project. I had two nights to rig it, and because we wanted an x ray shot I spent most of my time rigging the claws to retract in the sheaths in the forearms.

Google Sites

Report abuse