Rigging Dojo Week 2

I’m a week behind but that’s better than 2 weeks behind right? This weeks focus was on joint placement and initial skinning of my character. The character’s name is Frank and he is from a short film that a friend and I have been working on, he did the modeling and character design.

Challenges

• Frank is fat, let’s not beat around the bush. Volume preservation is probably the most important and challenging thing for this guy. His neck and wrists, oh, and that huge gut too are all in need of clever joint placement and weighting.
• Pants are a challenge in this case due to the shape as well, making sure he keeps his butt volume when squatting down while not overly scrunching up the front of the pants is still work in progress. Most likely some corrective shapes will be in order.
• His shirt will be skinned overtop of his body and will have some nCloth on it with the inputMeshAttract turned up so it’s just subtle enough to get some nice sliding and secondary motion on the collar and sleeves. Keeping the speed up the rig up and avoiding intersecting mesh will be…fun.

References

The references I was able to gather helped with the joint placement. If you look at the image below with the x-rays you can see how deceiving the outer flesh shell can be. The skeleton is a normal slender frame and joint placement should reflect that in a character that is larger like Frank. There another image from Wreck-it-Ralph that I thought was as great example of volume preservation in a tough pose, so I used that as a goal to get Frank into something similar.

I haven’t added any helper joints yet, that will be week 4 (technically this week), week 3 Updates soon. I think the hands and shoulders turned out the best, I hoping to make the wrists awesome too.