Jeremy Davidson writes:
Hello blendernation!
Up in the now 24 hour sunny Norway, I'm working with the studio FabelFjord on their new short for the Dunderly universe. Helping turn their wonderfully drawn children's books to life!
We're well and truly into the animation part of things and thought i'd share with you a rig showcase of one of our main characters, Bulder.
The short, "Dunder", will be 7-8mins long, based in the Dunderly story book universe written by Endre Lund Eriksen, who also developed the script for this short. We're currently 2 months into the animation phase of the short, with the release set for early 2016.
The 3 characters, Bulder, Lex and Modika, will be created and animated in Blender, to be then comped over the top of live plates of a beautifully created miniature environment (photos of which can be found on the Dunder facebook page).The studio FabelFjord is based in Tromso Norway where its currently sunny, all day and all night (which takes some getting used to!). And there are already plans in motion to create a feature length Dunderly film at a later date.
The sites are mostly in Norwegian, but google translate works well enough :)
Enjoy!
Jeremy Davidson,
Durian and Mango
Rigger-Animator
Links
9 Comments
this is super cool!
amazing rig, model looks great also, but this rig is masterpiece
Thanks for the kind words! The model is great, such a treat to work with. Rigging is always fun with crazy emotive characters like this. Really makes you push it in all directions :)
Great stuff here! I would like to know where i can find some tutorials about building RIG like yours. Any suggestions?
Hi, i don't know what you mean by 'like yours', but you can have a look at the 'Creating an advanced face rig' tutorial on Blender Cookie (this one is free).
https://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-courses/creating-an-advanced-face-rig/
I don't think there are panels like in the video shown here though (which is maybe what you want to imitate, i would be interested to learn about it myself ! ). Hope it helps anyway ! :-)
For the body, the 'Intro to rigging' series by Blender Guru is nice too.
http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-to-rigging/
Probably replying to my comment ;)
The panel was easy enough to set up. I put an extra layer of bones underneath the tweak bones of the face (i.e. duped the tweaks, then parented them to the new ones).
Then animated facial poses in the action editor and piled on the action constraints to the new layer of bones. All being driven by the sliders on the panel (which are just bones with shapes)
Layering the bones like this is what allows you to tweak them afterwards.
Thanks Stephane and Jeremy,
"like yours" is just the result of my very poor English, sometime i translate directly from italian and dosen't work :)
Thanks for the links anyway!
@Jeremy: great tips!
It's perfectly correct English :-) I just wanted to say I wasn't sure if you were talking about the more awesome parts of the rig (the panels for instance) or the general building of the rig.
ah ok then :)
I was referring to the whole rig. In fact, coming from Softimage where i was used to create rig, i am now trying again to understand the "way of Blender"