The Rey Dau was a fun rigging project because of how complex the creature is. Every part of its face can move, and the broken-up wings gave me a real challenge. I built this rig to test myself on complex characters, from insane wing designs to strange faces with extra appendages, and it proved I can rig just about anything. 

A dinosaur like character with a long, expressive snout and tail, rigged using Advanced Skeleton in Maya. I went in depth on the weight painting to support any kind of movement, including a switch to quadruped locomotion. The advanced facial rig covers emotions, vowel shapes, eye controls, pupil controls, and much more. IK/FK switches on the legs, arms, torso, and tail give animators full control over every pose. 

The Mosswine rig was built in Blender with a full pipeline to Unreal Engine in mind. Animators work on a Rigify rig, so posing and keyframing feel the same as any other Rigify character. That rig connects to a second, Unreal-compatible skeleton, so every animation transfers straight into a rig built for the engine without any extra cleanup. The project also shows the Unreal Engine side: what the rig looks like in the engine, and how it plays back with animation applied. 

A Garchomp rig built in Blender for basic posing and simple movement animations. I used Rigify as the foundation and did all the weight painting by hand, so the deformation stays clean and the pose reads well from every angle. 

I helped bring a friend’s zombie model to life for animation by building a custom rig from scratch. A lattice modifier drives the guts hanging out of the body. The standout feature is the arm made of bones, with tons of hinge points all the way down to the tiny bone hand at the end. The legs, arms, and torso all have IK/FK switches, and there’s a fun extra hip controller for added flexibility. 

This stylized Medusa rig blends IK and FK for expressive, cartoony posing. Her hair is made of three snakes tied to a single controller. When she looks left or right, the left and right snakes move in opposite directions, so the hair reacts naturally to every turn of the head.

Another model I rigged for a friend in college, and this one is much more monstrous. It has a solid body that sits low to the ground as it crawls, with extra-long front arms and tiny back legs. It could be a funny creature if it wasn’t chasing you. I used Blender and Rigify again, with mouth and tongue controls to make it extra scary. 

Although Powder comes as a demo project, I challenged myself to recreate the rig in every way I could. It has facial capture, Unreal Engine importing, hair controls, and everything else from the rigs above, plus more. I even tested audio-to-facial-animation software on it. I used this project to learn how to rig anything with Advanced Skeleton, use the rig anywhere, and import it into any pipeline. 

The robot goblin is all about its intricate robotic legs, which combine IK and FK for flexible, mechanical movement. I also built custom controllers for the gun in its head and the other weird bits that make this little guy so strange. 

A simple but flexible IK rig with two roots for extra control. That setup makes animating a lamp jumping around almost too fun, and it shows that a rig doesn’t need to be complicated to be full of personality.