2014-10-01

Harald rig breakdown


Harald rig breakdown from Parzival Roethlein on Vimeo.

In 2011 I worked on my last student short at Filmakademie called Harald: https://www.facebook.com/haraldfilm

I was responsible for the main character rigs (including blendshape and some meshflow modeling), animation scripts/support and animated one shot.

Final meshflow

At first I updated my PyMEL autorigger from 2010 and rigged the bodies with it. Both spine and the bendy limbs are modified ribbon setups (see older post: Joint chain rigging techniques). There are no (corrective-) blendshapes for the body, only skinning.
The faces use a standard blendshape + joint combination to match the expression sheet and allow for customization. Reverse wrap deformer for eye bulge in eyelid. Eyelid joints sliding on geometry. Rig performance had some priority and the finished rig showing the final deformation (one subdivision level) ran at over 20 fps.

I created some animation scripts for the project Maya shelf including a UI (first time using Qt) requested by the animators, which was supposed to be similar to the one they used in a previous Filmakademie short: Der Besuch

And finally I animated one shot because I always wanted to do that, even thou I am not an animator. My previous experience was very limited, so I had to learn most animation principles for the first time and it certainly was a fun exercise to use my own rigs.

2014-09-22

BabyDragon walkcycle rig breakdown


Baby Dragon walkcycle rig breakdown from Parzival Roethlein on Vimeo.

This is a personal project from early 2013.
When I saw a turntable of the dragon on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/52581835), I contacted the modeler. And after I was done with the rig a co-worker / fellow student did the animation.

For the neck / spine / tail I used the curve/up-curve setup, described in an older post of mine, with one joint for each spike:
Joint chain rigging techniques

Credits:
Modeller/Surfacing: Angel Navarro angelnavarroart.com/
Character TD: Parzival Roethlein
Animator: Alexander Dietrich cargocollective.com/alexanderdietrich



Unrelated to this post, I recently updated an older post:
Maya naming conventions