Personal Character Rig Critique 1

In this blog post, I am going to critique a rabbit rig that put together for my character rigging class project at Fullsail University.

T-pose

Shoulders Shrugging

This rig was a bit of a challenge as this was my first professionally built rig in Autodesk Maya. I built the base joint structure to fit the rabbit model by snapping each joint hinge to vertice points on the model so when I cut the model into pieces, I would be able to attach the corresponding joints to those cut pieces.

Once I finished that, I created an RFL (Reverse Foot Lock) system which followed the foot joint backwards so that I could make the foot's heel tilt up, roll left and right, and lift at the ball of the foot.

I then moved onto the hand leg joints where I created IK handles which allow three joints to bend just as an elbow or knee joint would allow. Before I created the arm IK handles, I created a different type of IK handle called a single-chain-solver which uses two or more joints and causes the chain to follow the handle's orientation. The other type of IK handle is called Rotate-plane-solver which is constrained to the orientation closest to the base joint. For the back I created an IK-spline-handle which uses a control curve as a spinal chord in the sense that it does not break unevenly. The spine also has a bend and stretch deformer that allows the rig to stretch and squash like a cartoon character.

Fighting Stance

Anticipation

Walking Pose

Once I was finished with the joints, I created a vast assortment of control curves to act as what some might call "puppet-strings". These control curves were then parented to their corresponding joints on the rig using the IK handles to move the rabbit model as an animation asset for movies or video-games. 

Toe-Touch

I Think I did a decent job for a very basic character rig, however I would like to point out the problems I had and the issues that this rig has. The first thing I would like to point out is that I was not able to paint weights onto the character model which would allow the rig's geometry (body) seams to split or break. I have very minimal finger control attributes as I only made a control that allows all three fingers to bend, a thumb drop, thumb pivot, thumb curl, as well as an attribute that causes the three fingers to sway back and forth, however I made the mistake of only adding this function to the right hand's control. Another Issue I knew of was that I had used a very simple constraint to the eye controls. The eye controls operate fine, however there are more complex and efficient ways of accomplishing this task than what I have performed. The biggest issue I had was that I neglected to hide certain controls that I had no use for anymore.

Thank you for reading, and please follow my blog for more critiques.