Anomalia 2011 Rigging Course

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spent two weeks in the Czech Republic giving a Rigging Masterclass. It was part of the Anomalia professional training courses which take place at the European Training Center in Litomysl, a beautiful Bohemian town close to Prague.



Once again, it's been a great experience to share with the students (actually professionals of the field most of them) our ideas, techniques and also a good knowledge about all types of czech beer brands, thanks to the local guys!




Sooo, I'll be looking forward to going back to Litomysl in the future for the next course. Thanks a lot to David Tousek for all his effort on organising the courses and counting on me for the rigging masterclass. And thank you so much to all the students for being so enthusiastic and for their patience!



ps. And thanks to Vasilis for this self-explanatory drawing, a great advertisement for future students. Plok!

Cow rig for Aardman's "Moo"

Recently finished this character rig for a new Aardman's commercial, created for Colman's new instant beef gravy. Directed by Bobby Proctor, and nicely animated by the great Mathew Rees.

It's been interesting to deal with the biped-quadruped rig issue. As usual, we used two different rigs, but in this case even two different models were created and rigged for each version.

Check out the final animation here, hope you like it!

Rigging Masterclass at ESMA

I'm just back from Montpellier where I've spent 4 days at the ESMA school. It's been great to give my rigging workshops there, but the best thing definitely being with the students and helping them with their short-films projects.
They're doing an awesome work so their character rigs are high-level, amazing! Hope I will have the chance to see all the finished films in the next Jury.
Thanks a lot to Gerard Raucoules for being such a good host and teacher!

Aardman Centra Hurling Stings

Character rigs I did recently for Aardman. Javier "Karry" León was the CG Supervisor for this short clips, animation by Hugo García.

Skyscraper in action!

Dreamwork's animator Mike Walling has prepared a great Body Mechanics animation webinar for Jason Ryan Animation site. It has two parts, Animation Walk Through part One: Planning, blocking, & Blocking Plus, and Animation Walk Through part Two: Splining and Polish. You can check it out at http://jrawebinar.com/index.php?option=com_rokquickcart&view=rokquickcart&Itemid=1

The cool thing for me is that he's been using Skyscraper, the character I built and rigged for iAnimate school. Take a look at the webinar's teaser and see the rig in action :-)

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!