Rigging Project: Pigsy

 Rigging Project: Pigsy

April 2021

This is my latest project, the first of many hopefully leading to a fun final product. Pigsy is their name, and they are a sentient piggy-bank set to be the main star in my developing animated short. This is my first original character built from the ground up from conceptualization to fully rigged model.

This rig has full rotation capabilities in the body, head, and limbs. Movement in 3D space can be achieved with either the main body control, or the root control. The face has some more specific controls, such as a head tilt (in place of a neck), nose tilt, and one of my favorites: eyebrow movement and manipulation. Finally, the eyes are 2D grafted onto the model, made by an image sequence which can be toggled to display one of the many eye textures I have drawn up. There are also a few more specialized features intended to enhance the animated scenes to come.

As this is my first original character made from the ground up, I was hesitant to dive into the vast pipeline from modeling to rigging to animation, but by keeping my ambitions in check, I was fairly confident I could do it all on without having to compromise too much. I am happy to say I was able to accomplish what I set out to create almost exactly.

Making the armature for Pigsy didn't take too long, as I actually started building it as I modeled the character parts. Once I got to the actual rigging process, I ran through the process as I had envisioned and just observed what worked as intended and what didn't. The legs, body, and main head controls went together flawlessly. Meanwhile, with the help of a few tutorials, the eye texturing and eyebrow controls turned out alright as well. 

 

 

The only real point trouble was the eyebrow manipulators, as I wanted the easiest way to get clean deformation without too complex a rigging system. The solution was lattice deformation, which turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. With one control on each end of each eyebrow, I can squash and stretch to just about any extreme, which should prove very useful for expressions in animation. I am very proud and excited to see what I can do with such a feature.

This rig was a nice challenge to have as my first original character. On one hand, I had a clear vision of what I wanted the character to be capable of. On the other hand, there were obvious tasks I would have to face and problem solve for. The finished product has just about all I had hoped for. 

I began development of my first original character and soon-to-be short animation a little over a month ago, and this is one of the largest steps so far. This is the first result of my labors. I hope to push forward and begin animation and scene building next, but before that, I must begin production of additional assets and other necessary materials. Luckily, the main model here is out of the way, so the process will be a bit less stressful in the days to come.