Tecnical / Development
Animation
As an animator, I’ve picked up lots of ways to speed up the workflow, whether through rigging, building tools, or making pose libraries. Here, you’ll find some of the tools I’ve created to make animation faster.
This is a character I modeled, rigged, and posed. My focus was on creating a pose library that matched his cartoony, appealing style. I built a wide range of variations for the mouth, eyes, brows, and hands, along with extra facial expressions to push his personality even further.
Magical Staff Rig
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Animation Test
In Gembound, the mother speaks to her children through this staff, so it needed to convey her emotions. The design and rig make the gem and staff function like an eye, while each flower has its own tweak controls (plus a master controller for all of them). The trunk is an FK chain with an extra controller that lets it deform forward, backward, and side to side.
For the animation, I wanted the staff to float smoothly, with its “eye” leading the movement. I created this animation test to show the animators the specific motion I had in mind and to help communicate how the staff should feel in action.
Rig base script by ant.cg
Dress Rig
​I wanted Aria, the eldest, to have a dress. Since we didn’t have enough time to fully learn dress simulation, I rigged it instead. The setup allowed us to animate the dress with a single controller, while still having extra tweaks to simulate the bones when needed. I also added a blend shape for sitting poses.
Facial Rig
Zid the Cat had a different, more cartoony facial structure than a human, so we couldn’t rely on ant.cg’s base facial rig script. I built a custom facial rig for him that combined facial tweaks with blend shapes for the eyes. This gave us the flexibility to animate Zid in the cartoony style we envisioned.
