Adin Rig Spotlight
Spring
Pictured to the right is just the beginning of the facial setup for Adin. most of the blendshapes visible here are for the mouth corners, though one is for the ribbon lips. I will soon be adding things like cheek puffing, eyelid controls, and much more to make Adin fully animatable,
The first time I was given a full quarter to really work fully on a rig, I decided I was going to give it my all. Throughout my experience, I have rigged many bipeds, and many faces, but this one is different. My normal joint based biped setup would not suffice for Adin the faun.
Spring is a film by Abbie Foulke centering on the dance between the two characters. Adin, the faun, was assigned to me across a full quarter's time, allowing me to really work to my full ability on the rig.
Simply by nature of being a faun, Adin presented many new challenges to rig. His lower body needed to be setup like a horse's hind leg, which was what initially drew me to the project. Once I found that I was happy with his lower body, his upper body was simple, and it was time to start working on his face.
The hind leg is very similar to the setup that I used for the Snow Leopard, but with an added IK FK switch, stretching, and a few extra controls. It was very different from a typical biped leg setup, but still had to feel like it belonged on the character.
The upper body was a regular biped, so that was nothing new, but I made sure to blend the two halves seamlessly, as well as ensuring that the skinweights on the whole rig were as perfect as possible.
The main bulk of time that I spent on this rig went to the face, ensuring that the mouth corner blendshapes, which are something I was doing for the first time for this rig, were perfect. I wanted to his face to be as expressive as possible, so I gave him strong brow controls, and even ear controls.
Final Adin Rig Full Body