Cartoon Lemon Rig
I re-rigged this hilarious-looking model as part of a rigging project to learn more about creating a flexible cartoony rig.
I added more advanced features:
ribbon rigs to the limbs -- it allows for the use of volume deformers and sine deformers as part of the limbs;
muscle surface attach nodes for face controls -- the controls will follow the geometry of the model;
lattices for more head/body deformations;
used vectors for the eyelid joints so that they stay around the eyeball.
Original model and rig: https://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/1046772
Maya Character Rigging Timelapse for Thesis
Rigging progress that I did as a Character TD for my BFA thesis at San Jose State University -- this was the third character that needed to be used for an acting-heavy short film.
The biped Fit Skeleton was used with the Twist Joints and Bendy Joints attribute applied on the limbs.
The Twist Joints were removed from the default biped neck for a more realistic neck deformation.
The fat attributes on joints were used in conjunction with the Display cylinders to get the size of the majority of controls closer to finish.
FK Joints were manually added to create controls for the hair.
Skin Cages were used to guide a majority of the body Skinning.
A lot of back and forth was done with fitting and building the face -- the jaw was the step that required the most tweaking.
The AnimationTester tool was used to help the majority of weight painting. Corrective Shapes were used for the knee, elbow, and shoulder.
Cluster SoftMods were added to create controls for the collar and sleeve -- the Swap function was used to easily replace default nurbs Sphere with a box curve.
Ken character modeled by Truc 'Bamboo' Nguyen, Alexandra Farnsworth, Caitlyn Bui, and Mitch Alano.
Rigging progress that I did as part of a BFA thesis short film at San Jose State University -- showing everything such as the crashes and technical problems I went through.
In the beginning, the head was still being modeled and fixes were being made to the body, so I went ahead and started working on the skeleton.
Once the model was finished, I imported the skeleton I had created earlier, and continued to work on the head and skinning of the body. I switched to Maya 2020 in the middle because some modeling had been done in 2020 and would cause crashing with the face setup.
In the end, I had to manually create corrective blendshapes because the custom controls that I added to the hair and clothes messed up with the way Advanced Skeleton's Corrective Blendshapes identified what controls were moved.
Currently for this thesis project, the grandma is now being animated, and I will continue to rig the other characters and help with animation.
YuQian Grandma character modeled by Truc 'Bamboo' Nguyen and Alexandra Farnsworth.