Rigging The Characters

As you can see from the rigs below Bob and SK are finally rigged. They're very simple rigs constraining certain meshes to the bones. The weight painting consists of clicking the plane and clicking a bone and hitting flood, (very easy). Where these rigs can get complicated is because in the case of Bob he has 2 sets of arms. One set trailing behind and the other set consists of 2 tentacles. This means that the shoulders have to be linked and placed in the same place.

SK's rig is very straight forward, in fact it couldn't be easier. His hands are the hardest part as there are 8 separate parts on each hand and that's no real problem.

Bob's rig is the complicated one. Not in any real technical way but there are several different parts which are rigged then attached to the main body. This means that one must be aware of all the parts when rigging and how they will effect or hide the planes I have used for the individual mouth shapes. This is no real issue as there is no real need for paint weighting (hit flood) and the different parts can be rigged and then attracted to the main body.

Obviously there are no blend shapes although there could have been as I have experimented with them. However blend shapes n 2D are just as hard as 3D but with added problems and in fact they seemed to take longer. Using 2D planes meant that the shapes had more of natural feel to them as they were based upon my drawings.






Rigs by Sam Berry.