Diving into rigging

After hearing a lot of people talking about creating a fresh reel with your own characters I decided to dive in the world of rigging too. I had some mixed feelings about this because it's hard enough to become a good animator and your really need to spend a lot of hours to improve. (Thinking about the 5.000 hours Shawn Kelly was writing about in his blog before).

But on the other hand, it think it's a good thing for an animator to understand that rigging thing some more too and to be able to communicate well with the technical departments. At the moment I am working my way trough the Jason Schleifer rigging tutorial. And I am surprised how clear he explains everything in a way an non tech guy like me can understand all this. I already knew he's a great teacher at Animation Mentor but never expected that these DVD's were so clear and thoroughly documented. Really great stuff.

At first I wanted to try to rig with auto-riggers, and that could work great too, but than I would not expand my knowledge on this subject. So that's why I decided to take this rocky road and fill my brain with new stuff and have fun along the way.

Here is the character I designed. Did some facial tests in Maya too. It's still a work in progress.

Based my new knowledge I am going to finish the model try to create a rig from scratch for this dude. Just wish me good luck the next few weeks. I think I am going to need it:-)