Diving into rigging part 2

Here is a movie with my curent eye setup for my new character. I wanted to create a separate set of eyes that I can attach to the head rig with locators. This way I will have a flexible setup so I can move the eyes around freely.

All the attributes for shaping the eyelids and pupil dialation are in the eye controllers and can be adjusted in the channelbox.

The reshaping of the whole eye is done with separate controllers that drive a lattice. I have three controllers per eye that can rotate, translate and scale so I can have a lot of fun with the eye shapes. I will also add brows to the rig. These can be modified with a separate controller.

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:-)

Bike

I also modeled and rigged a bike last week. I even added a wheely controller :-). A big thanks to Henk Kok who helped me write an expression to be able to counter rotate the pedals to keep m horizontal when a character is riding the bike.

Rigging

Working on a new project where I also have to design, model and rig the characters.

I am using The Setup Machine for rigging the body and that works pretty nice. I only still have to fix some weight painting. But overall I am pretty happy with this tool. This week I will do the facial rigging with the Face Machine and I am very curious how that will work and how heavy the rig will become.

Rendertest 2

So today it was time to do some more testrenders and dressing up the character with some hair and clothes. There are still some tweaks to be made. I am not so happy about the eyes. They have a weird glow around the iris. I also need to tweak the animation just a little so I guess be the end of the week I will give my computer no sleep to do the renders for me at night.

Doodles

Just some funny doodles I created this morning. Made me create a new banner for my blogsite.

Pet Alien

Just a funny sketch.

The Viking, work in progress

A funny little character model I am working on when I have some spare time.

Smile, your on camera!

Some characters I am modeling in Maya just for giggles. Work in progress. Would be nice to be able to rig and animate them later.