Breakdown
Featured
Rigged the fortresses on the elephants. Modelled in 1:1 with individual planks. Created a light weight proxy for animation that output world space data for each plank, that Framestore’s in house instancer would pick up and load the published model at render time.
Rigging of the Valkyrie digital doubles, capes and augmented existing horse rig for Pegasus wings and feather articulation and skinning
Facial rigging of creature Hightower, mostly blendshape driven, but also contained a hybrid of joints and deformers
Rigging of Hightower creature with a modified biped rig to account for the longer neck and unique leg anatomy. Wrote new neck and foot python modules that get exchanged for the default biped modules at build time.
Cobra snake rigging with facial. Facial rig was a hybrid of blendshapes and joints for the most part. Using joints and set driven keys to create fleshy effects that could be dialled in or out by the animator, reducing the overall number of facial controls.
Cobra snake rigging with facial. High res mesh was super dense, so used a lower resolution for the rig which was exchanged for a high res rig at animation cache time. Rig used some custom Iloura plugins and a lot of curved based rigging. If I can recall…Had a curve for the snake, another for the up vector, another for the fixed length and the snake had the ability to fix or stretch individual sections along the spine. Deformation was a base of good skinning and layered collision deformers and squash/volume deformers on top to handle the scales and squash of the body on the ground.
Used the instancing workflow I developed on King Arthur to add flex to the massive space ship Covenant. Again, modelled in 1:1 scale down to individual bolts, so used a proxy for animation that was swapped out by the instancer for the published model at render time.
Rigged crowd assets and developed a crowd promotion-demotion workflow to promote a crowd cached asset to a rigged and animated asset, so that Animation could take the output from Massive and make art-directed changes to specific assets in a shot.
Rigging of sparrows. This blurb could be huge as anyone who has ever had to develop a bird rig would know. Its complex and to be honest I re-developed the wing modules for a later project. We got it done, and it was a learning curve. Birds will never be my favourite creature, but the challenge is rewarding.
This iteration of a wing was mostly joint/spline based and incredibly slow. Functional, but slow. Wing 2.0 was curve based and a good deal faster, though its a bird and I’m yet to get anywhere near a real-time bird rig but I’ll keep improving it. Maybe one day…
Rigging of Squidward and Sally. Slightly more realistic setups than the non-hero counterparts. Used a muscle setup to output a range of motion in blendshapes that were then driven by pose readers to get a muscly look without the weight. Worked reasonably well, with post-sculpt clean up.
Facial rigging for Squidward. Faces between the small and hero characters were kept the same so that the facial rig would work on both characters. Used layers of different rigging practices in order to get the desired result. Squidward’s lips were particularly challenging, as they needed to maintain their tubular volume and smoothness while shifting in dramatic amounts.
Motion capture to rig for the Engineers. Honestly it was so long ago I cant recall the details, but we did use Maya’s Characterize method to retarget the motion capture to our rigs.
Just another look at the sparrows. Character rig and wings with primary (physical) feathers, facial rigs too.
Facial rigging of creature Hightower, mostly blendshape driven, but also contained a hybrid of joints and deformers