My facial rig design is only dependent on 4 things. The character model The guide placement The weight maps The sculpts/blendShapes Models: I'll ignore the character model for this post but there are important considerations for speeding up workflow. Guides: I have a method of transferring guides that's basically a simpler version of this. Weights: Most of the setups I use on my facial rigs are parameterized, as a result the weighting from one character transfers well to anot

There's a lot of stuff on my website about sliding joints along a nurbs surface to approximate the UVN deformer that Blue Sky had developed. The UVN deformer has 2 major advantages over the skinCluster approximation. The Volume Issue: The first one is that it's much better for volume preservation. Imagine a side view like this. If you joint travels straight down, the vertices on the arced part of the surface (the characters forehead), will also be pulled straight down, instea

The first images from the MLP movie I worked on while at Boulder Media have finally released. It's really great to see peoples positive reactions to the new characters. I did a lot on the film, and I made a very thorough post-mortem for the rigging department after I left. Some of that post-mortem has already made it's way onto this blog in the form of custom deformers but a lot of it is still secret.

Whenever I have to set up a cluster deformer using matrices I have to try and remember how all the different matrix attributes contribute to the overall deformation. I've never bothered to write it down but after discovering a bug in one of my rigs was being caused by an incorrectly set up cluster I decided I need to write it down. So I'm putting the info here in case someone else finds it useful in the future. So when deforming a shape that has all 1's as it's weight map: vt