bh_multiples demo 1..

I’ve been thinking recently about better ways of doing multiple-limb smear frames in CG. Most of the solutions I’ve seen involve modding a rig to give it extra limbs which I don’t think is ideal as it makes the rig slower, gives the animator more controllers to keep track of and is generally a little tedious to work with. So this is my first pass at a different approach. It takes very minimal setup and works on any rig. If it feels kind of similar to my ghost tool.. it should! It’s based on similar concepts.. Still very much a WIP at the moment but I think it has some promise..

Shadow Face Rig for iAnimate

ShadowFinishedBLOG

Today I delivered the finished version of a brand new rig for the iAnimate character ‘Shadow’. I re-rigged the body a while back and now I’ve added a very flexible face rig too which features both a GUI and on-face controls. The rig runs at real-time speeds and should be very fun to animate with. It was a little daunting building a rig to be used by an entire animation school but I learned a lot while building it and I’m pretty proud of it now and excited to see what the students do with it. I have a couple of ideas for shots I’d like to try with it myself..

Speed Rigging

Speed rigging through scripting, 22 sculpt controllers hooked up in under 60 seconds..

I run one proc at the start which does most of the work then I select each controller and hit ‘G’ (repeat last command) to do the rest. The final script you see me running finds and connects the translates of each controller to the relevant joints translates to drive the deformations.
I’m building this rig for the awesome online animation school iAnimate and it will be available for all of the students during the next block.