Dog rig for Aardman Animations Video Demo

Hey, as promised, here's a short demo showing the Dog rig in action. As mentioned before, for this character the Aardman guys didn't need a complex rig but rather a quick and flexible one. I didn't put any fancy features but had to pay attention to the skin weighting in order to achieve good deformations and volume preservation. Hope it shows how sometimes it's not all about complexity, simple rigs can be effective and good fun. Time spent on building it: 5 days. Model and blend shapes done by Martin Blunden.

Dog rig for Aardman Animations

This is one of the last characters I've had the opportunity to rig for Aardman. The design is pretty cool! Rigging-wise it's been a nice challenge, mainly due to his thick body and the overall volumes, and as well because of the squash & stretch and the flexibility needed.

I will post a small video-demo showing the rig in action. By now, here you can see one first posing & rendering test the Aardman team did right once I sent them the rig.

Cheers!

Rigging Courses at Pepechool

This happened a while back, but considering I'm trying (really hard) to catch up, I'm just posting it now.
I was giving two week-end rigging masterclasses at Pepe-school-land, here in Barcelona. Body setup, and Face Setup, that is.

http://www.daniel3d.com/pepe-school-land/seminarios/charsetup_victor/charsepup_I_victor.htm

It was amazing to see the classes fully booked and to share knowledge and experience with all the other riggers. Really good fun!!

The Businessman rig and Pixar animators, at Anomalia 2010

After months and months of receiving the most amazing feedback from a lot of people around the world, and asking if the businessman rig would be available online, it's now the time to actually do it.

The first step has been to lend the character rig for the Anomalia 2010 animation courses, organised by David Tousek and with Pixar animators Rich Quade and Andy Schmidt teaching right there, in the Czech Republic.



More on this subject later!

Skyscraper character

The students at iAnimate.net have been working for a while with the first character rig I finished for the school, Skyscraper.
This superhero guy has been designed by the mighty J.M.Oli, creator of the original businessman design as well.

For the original high-res image and more amazing stuff, check Oli's website :

http://www.nibbledpencil.com/

iAnimate school

One month ago, Jason Ryan started his new online animation school:

http://www.ianimate.net/

It's a great opportunity for animation students all around the world to get LIVE classes from the master's. The great thing for me is that I'm having the opportunity of building the character rigs for them. Thanks Jason!!

ehem!...

It's been a shameful while since my last post. Let's put it like this: too much work! Let's try to recapitulate what's been happening. Look above!