Rigging Part 6: further progress and Development

Now having submitted my initial rig to the animators and to the director, its value was up for scrutiny. The first version was a start however it was clear that the rig had issues that needed to be resolved. The major ones involved amending the leg and feet controls for them to move in the appropriate way. There was also a request by the animators for certain neck and jaw controls.

Due to the level of these issues, it was better for me to start the rig controls from scratch. Fortunately, Due to my systematic versioning, I had the rig development over many stages. I was able to go back to the stage where I built the skeleton but not begun building the control handles. Since this was the stage that needed to be amended, I was able to restart from here with all the faults in mind.

Here are some screen shots to indicate the rig at a stage where I picked up and then restarted.

Joint Orientation Check

Binding the Mesh to the Rig

Extreme Poses, in particular, for the feet controls

Testing and painting weights with the old mesh

Introducing the new mesh

Transferring the painted weights information to the new mesh

Testing and checking poses

Conclusion:

From this period of the pipeline my work was validated by the animators and eventually the director. At this point I had to meet the requirements for the project to go ahead. With good intra-team communication I managed to make a rig that met the specifications in order to have a fully functioning creature in our short film!