Some animation stuff I;ve been rigging

[jim c]

Recently I took part in a cloth competition for Houdini, and got fascinated with customizing the rig, havin built a number of custom rigs in Messiah. So I thought I would give it a go again (the last time I tried this a couple years back using the AutoRig, but ran into some problems, mostly of my own making due to my own inexperience).

Messiah lets you create a basic rig really fast, but I was also impressed with Houdini's tools as well. Perhaps a little slower, perhaps not, depending on how familiar you are with the rigging process. But alot more customizable so far. So two attempts, one a new model and rig, Mr Bob:

All FK, no IK used for this one.

Made a custom OTL for making UIs like those found in Jason Osipa's "Stop Staring" book

And some more blend shapes on the face

And then had so much fun I re-rigged a character I ad done in Messiah but ran into problems with the tubing and body movements. Thanks to the Follow Curve IK solver, I was able to get this to work, along with the Sticky object (very cool once you have good symmetric UV's). This rig include IK/FK for the arms and IK for the legs. And some extra bones and curves for the back to get the back spines to smoothly curve with with the back, as opposed to just parenting them to certain bones (which looked too "boxy" or stiff). Now the tubing does a much better job of following along and not pinching.

[jim c]

I posted some videos of these rigs in action:

[edward]

Looking good, Jim!

[jim c]

Here's another character I've been working, nearly finished the rig.

First pic is the rig network. The helmet tube has both a curve that drives the bones, as well as a simple sim using a wiresolver to drive the curve. This part still has some issues with collision and the way it looks. The final pic is a render from ZBrush (posed with ZB, not the rig), the texturing is close to being finished but not quite there.