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.