Rigging

Mechanical Spider Rig


Mechanical Spider Rig: File Size 2.01MB: This video is a simple playblast of an animation I setup to show off this mechanical spider rig. The rig was done using Maya 7.0, and the model was done and supplied by my teacher Sean Spitzer. I have the video setup showing the UI I created and connected to the rig side-by-side with the rig animation itself. There is a fairly large number of joints that are all working either simultaneously to get certain actions I have setup in the UI, or just for a single portion of the model.

Facial Rig


Facial Rig: File Size 3.86KB: Here is a playblast of an animation I setup in Maya to show my facial rig I did along with how the UI I setup for it works with it.. The model itself is named Zuckafa and is from the supplied dvd that comes with the book The Art of Rigging from CG Toolkit. I really liked how this rig turned out, the control system and rig setup are entirely of my own, I semi-based the UI controls from the one they used in the book, but strayed from it so I could fit some different controls in there for the forehead and such. I am only using 11 joints for the face and head, and I around 11 joints for the tongue as well, the rest is all done with blend shapes. There is over 25 blendshapes for this model, and that is how I get many of the results, as opposed to the jaw movement which I spent a lot of time with to get the desired results. All of the work for this was done using Maya 6.0.1.

Expression Driven Wing Rig


Expression Driven Wing Rig: File Size 2.39MB: What we have here is a little 10 second animation of a fully expression driven wing rig I did for class. The goal of the assignment was to create a realistic looking wing rig based off of an example he gave us that used four different deformers. Except we were to do it in a more beneficial way, using less deformers or any other way we could manage it. After getting a decent one with deformers and getting fed up with the deformers crushing my system performance a lightbulb lit up, "WAIT, I can use a recursive expression of sorts!!!" So I did, and this is the results.

What it does is the little controller you see on the right drives the what would be shoulder joint and the rest animates itself. How it does that is finding out the current joint's parent's rotation value from 15 frames prior and multiplies that resulting value by a small random scalar value to add a bit of randomness and a realistic look.

All Works ©2006 Kenneth Stojevich