Rocket Girl Rig Part 3

Rigging the upper body

Using methods that did not differ much from rigging the legs, I created similar controls for the arms. Here are a number of tests which I carried out to evaluate the progress of my work.












Rigging the Hair
Knowing that the character was a young girl with a playful bubbliness about herself, I knew that the hair  controls would be an essential part of the rig to give an added organic feel to the rig. I used IK spline solvers with parented clusters to achieve this. I tried to have a clear and pleasing design that would remain animator friendly whilst enabling a wide variety of hair movements.

Here are some snap shots to indicate a better view of the hair set up as it was developed.

Rigging the Skirt

One of the most challenging aspects that I faced whilst rigging was the daunting task of making a "skirt rig". To even try to imitate something so flexible and organic was going to be very different from what I had attempted before. I was also told that animators would ideally like to be able to have a good level of control over the way the skirt behaved and therefore could not simply just be bound to the legs.

I decided to take two of the major aspects into consideration:
1. Do the animators want the skirt to move completely automatically (i.e via a skin bind to the legs), but then have little or no control over the motion of the skirt. or
2. Do the animators want total control over the skirt, but then have to completely animate cloth?!

I felt that it would be best to encorporate both of these aspects through the use of influence objects. Partly the skirt would be influences by the legs, however the rings that surround the skirt also have partial influence over the skirt to tweak any look that they may go for.

I also decided to add a very nice extra feature that the animators could use if they wanted. I created a wave deformer that is set up in just the right way so that if they wanted, they may be able to achieve waves on the skirt similar to cloth that may blow in the wind. Although many of the aspects of rigging had been built from tutorials, I feel this is one element that I developed to my projects needs through trial and error. I was very pleased with the evental outcome and did further tests to confirm my results.