Rigs

I did all the rigging for my short film. It was an educational experience, and I learned a lot about rigging as I went through the process, but I also learned one very important lesson: I do NOT want to be a rigger as a career. I have a lot of respect for the people who do this job, but it leans a little too technical for my tastes (rear: I can't script to save my life).

Jeff is built with a bipedal skeleton. Both his arms and legs have an FK/IK switch, with a blend node so I can smoothly switch between the two. However, the arm IKs were hard to get right. I placed a bone in the forearm to function as a twist for the wrist, but that extra bone would cause the IK to not hold its place as I animated the hands. It took months to figure out but I finally got it to work by parenting the wrist to the elbow as I stead of the forearm, so the IK was not affected by the forearm bone (keeping the bone in the IK chain would make that act like a second elbow).

Jeff's face is a combination of joints and blend shapes. I put joints in the mouth and ears so that I could get more control with the face shapes as I animated. The cheeks and nose function as blend shapes for simple deformations I could use as I needed them. Since Jeff's eyes are part of his glasses, I just built controls directly to the little eye spheres so he can blink, squint, etc. I also created other eye shapes, an X and a sideways V, that I can switch to for extreme circumstances.

Some extra controls include some for Jeff's hair and his stomach. For the hair, I place several joints in his extended locks, kind of like building fingers for a hand. I then placed all the hair joints under a parent contract so I can move all the locks at once. I also placed individual controls on each lock in case I needed to add detail to the hair movement. For the stomach, I added a single control that could act as his stomach fat, allowing me to swing his tubby tummy around as he moves in each shot.

One other hard part of the rig was weight painting. Jeff is comprised of several meshes, so I had to paint the weights in a way that he could move and not have body parts clip one another. It's not perfect, but I am able to animate around a lot of the issues in the rig and make it work.

Since all the game characters are built out of cubes, I was able to group sets of cubes together to function as each body part. They only real challenge here was planning the build of the character so the outlines look right on each section of the body, and also so any clipping that occurs doesn't look off in some way.

Images of Jeff's Rig:

Images of some of the other character rigs: