So this month in my schooling I am working through Character Rigging 1. and for this month I am building a rig for one of several pre-built characters. I will be creating and developing the skeleton, rig, controls and blend shapes available to the animator, which will be me. I chose to work with Dr. Bloopdool, and here is a render of him.
My goal is to build a rig with which I can make Dr. Bloopdool break it down and do an incredible robot dance. I also like to think that because he seems to be at least part octopus he’ll prove to be very flexible. That being said I have no intention of breaking his bones, rather I intend to imbue him with a good range of motion in his joints. Now in light of my intention to make him do a dance I put together series of thumbnails that I have compiled into what I believe is called an animatic. When there’s a good song on you can hit the loop button on his dance and he just keeps going. His endurance for dancing can truly be incredible. So here’s the animatic:
I know it’s not a breathtaking accomplishment of artistic ability, but it still provides me with the breakdown of the action that I am trying to build. Now in pursuit of my goal of making him dance, I have begun to rig this character up and to build him a bit of a skeleton. I’ve made a brief video explaining what I have done for his head so far and I am hoping to put together the rig for his arms and LowerBody. Now the following video was recorded with FRAPS which is the software that I own for capturing videos off my screen, Unfortuneately it tends to create rather large files, as it does not use any compression as far as I know, so I wound up running this 5 min video through a converter which took it from a 370 mb file to a 32 mb file but skewed the resolution/aspect ratio a bit.