Specialism Module - Rigging

The goal of this project is to present a portfolio of evidence showing development in our chosen specialisation. For this, we will have five weeks where along with our personal projects we will be learning Mocap, Rigging, Rendering & Lighting, Character Design and Storyboarding.

At the start, I thought of doing my specialism in character animation, however, I started to consider exploring another area that had caught my attention since I started animating in Maya. I remember my first encounter with a rig was with the Bouncing Ball exercise, even though it is a very simple rig it was my first encounter with an object that could translate, scale, rotate and deform using controllers.

I was lucky enough to get closer to rigging in my first-year Animation module; I did a project where I required a bendy seesaw. My tutor Amedeo encouraged me to build it myself using what he had taught us, so I used a Bend Handle through the geometry to be able to deform it. I remember that I also added controls but I really struggled to make them work so I got help from my tutor, who introduced me to the Node Editor and the multiply divide node...

Recently I redid the seesaw rig using set driven keys on a Bend Handle:

To be able to learn rigging in more depth I will be taking an online course with Domestika taught by Jose Antonio Martin Martin.