2010 GDC Talk Lean and Mean Character Rigging

If you have not gotten a chance to watch this GDC talk by Sylvain Côté defintely take some time out of your day to do so, he covers a lot of great material.

Old Work

Here is some old work that was done at my last studio some modeling, scuplting, rigging, and tools. 

Game Models:

These are a few models I made during our concept phase.  The top two images are of a growing/housing pod for some of the enemy characters.  The last image is leg from the character that would be inside the pod.  The textures were done by Krystal McCrummen.

Custom Rigs:

This is a character the was done during early development.  He is a mutated human that possess telekinetic abilities.  He was skinned in maya and rigged in motion builder.  He has expression driven controls for his fat to move based on the leg movement while still being able to animate the controls.  The animations were done by Cory Collins.

 This is a the half clone character.  He was pulled out of the cloning tank mid way through the process.  He was skinned in maya and rigged in motion builder.  He has a dynamic setup for his lower body that reacts based of the translate and rotate of the spine.

 This the crawler.  He was skinned and rigged on maya.  He has an experssion based setup for his tail. Ik for the legs.  The animations were done by Cory Collins.

This was is a creature/mechanical rig I created that was used during our concept stage.  The rig has a custom GUI with IK/FK switching,expression driven controls, and set driven keys used for transformations.

Tools:

This is an example of the Dismemberment Tool I created for the game I'm currently working on.  The biggest challenge I had to overcome was that most of the characters were going to be skinned already when they were sent to the next step in the pipeline to be dismembered.  So with the tool it will save the weighting out for the character, then separate the mesh based on a few user input selections.  Then re-weight the mesh with the new geometry and apply a vertex color to the dismembered piece.

This is a tool I created for setting up the IK FK switch for amrs and legs.  By selecting the root of the arm/leg then selecting the end joint of the amr/leg it will build the IK arm setup,FK arm setup, and the right click option to space switch between IK and FK. The Only user input required to finish the setup is to save an reoload the scene for the right click option to take affect.  The GUI "Adjust Controls"  Allows you to change the position of a control easily without affecting its connections or keyframes.

I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat

Here is another short I was privileged to take part of.

The 5th Looney Tunes 3D Short “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat” Images have been revealed and the Film will play in Theaters with Happy Feet Two, which hits Theaters on November 18th.

“I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat”: A classic game of Cat and Bird transpires in Granny’s Apartment as Tweety Bird goes to great lengths to avoid the clutches of his arch-nemesis Sylvester the Cat. The short also features the hit song of the same name, which was performed by Blanc, and sold over three million copies worldwide.

video source http://thatsallfolks.com/

Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas Special

A Ice Age special I worked on will be airing on Fox Thanksgiving day at 8/7 central.  Will also be for sale on DVD/Blu Ray shortly after.

When Sid accidentally destroys Manny's heirloom Christmas rock and ends up on Santa's "naughty list," he leads a hilarious quest to the North Pole to make things right and ends up making things much worse. Now it's up to Manny and his prehistoric posse to band together and save Christmas for the entire world! 

Daffy's Rhapsody

 One of the Looney Tunes shorts that I worked on was announced a little while back.

"Daffy's Rhapsody": In the first of the new shorts, a persistent Elmer Fudd chases Daffy Duck (Blanc) on stage during a musical performance. The short features Blanc performing the song "Daffy Duck's Rhapsody."  in conjunction with Warner Bros. Pictures' release of Journey to the Center of the Earth 2.

 (via comingsoon.net)