Character Rig Demo vid - Moshi Monsters (*updated*)

[wip]

Hey all, I wanted to share with you a video of a rig I spent several weeks creating and testing for a production I recently finished:



The Moshi Monster characters were originally designed for Flash animation and for the feature film we used Celaction, but I wanted to exploit the features of Anime Studio for our 5 min+ project and create a nice rig. Also the character needed to be a little bit more believable since he would be sitting along side a live-action person. The final video won't be online for a while, but will update the post as soon as it is!

*edit:
And finally able to reveal the end result:
Jamie Oliver meets Moshi Monsters Furi cooking Muffins together.



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[Víctor Paredes]

Fantastic and inspiring!
It's so fascinating to see great rigs working together with great animation.
I loved (and I'm interested on) your eyes construction. The bone separating the pupils is a very smart detail. Also, the smart bone controlling all the individual eyelids bones at the same time is very nice. I'm always afraid to do that, because of the results you could get from rotating the master eye bone plus the independent eyelids bones at the same time. But maybe it's not such a big deal after all.

Thanks for sharing. Please remember to post the final animation once you be able to.

[Little Yamori]

That was awesome! Thanks for showing the intricate details.

Looking forward to seeing the whole animation.

LY

[3deeguy]

Loved it. Your rig answered one of my nagging questions. The part of your rig that popped out at me was the SB 'lever' that rotated his left foot in and out. The 'skeleton' bone inside in foot remained motionless. My brain has been stuck on the idea that the 'skeleton' bone has to rotate with the foot.
For several days I've been struggling with how to rig an arm to swing left and right and reach toward the camera. Thanks for sharing.

[neeters_guy]

Most impressive demo yet! Thanks for sharing.

[funksmaname]

Thanks for sharing... inspiring stuff

[Lukas]

Lekker bezig Wip!

[wip]

Thanks guys!
It was fun creating and experimenting with it.
I have to thank you especially Victor, It's been invaluable to see your methods. Please keep sharing anything you make! Always great to see your tricks.

So what I ended up doing was not to create a rig that has every bell and whistle. But enough for what the character would be doing. And also not necessarily easy to animate with because the face, hands and feet were rigged in separate files for testing and making sure it would work without getting distracted by everything else.

So for the eyes, I don't know if anyone else had done this before, I used smart bones hooked onto a target bone to move both pupils in one go. The reason there are two for each pupils left/right movement is because the character doesn't look very appealing when he looks dead strait ahead.



I'm using a circle as a reference for animation and while rigging the smartbones to only go as far as the edges, maybe a little bit beyond.

The extra little bone on the end of the target bone allows me to compensate for the offset of the pupils and is useful to make the make the character focus on specific distances (or to make him cross-eyed)

None of the smartbones really manipulate the points within the layers, that way nothing ends up conflicting and creating weird shapes when smartbones are combined. Also if an animator wants, they can go in and customise the look of the pupil, ie. reposition the light glimmer.

[chucky]

That was brilliant wip! Thanks for sharing, so impressed by that rig, animation and design. Bravo!

[beachbumlarry]

Amazing work!!! Thanks for sharing.

[wip]

Thank you guys! You can now check out the entire vid, updated the post at the top.

[3deeguy]

Jaw dropping... Even the interaction is amazing. It's guaranteed someone will demand Furi's recipe. I can't help thinking about licensing fees. Nice work!