Week 16: Layout Rigging!

As rigging work has slowly begun to dry up, I've been moving on to blocking out animation. I have about ten shots to complete in total, all relatively small (as I am not intending to be an animator by trade), as well as cloth simulation once shots start getting finalized.

For rigging, I've been doing up the props and layout for the animators. The layout for a Chess World scene needed every pillar rigged, and my job was to ensure that all twelve layouts (as they were each uniquely arranged for the camera shots) had ever pillar within it rigged. To accomplish this, I created a script that ran on the upright pillars. The restrictions of the script did mean I had to go in, straighten up the tilted pillars, then rig and reposition them.

Above is a demonstration of what the rig does. The rig is designed to give the animators complete control over the rotation and translation of the pillars so they can control the descent and have them react to the character running across them.