Animation Mentor students got a very sweet surprise this summer with the release of Bishop 2.0 but if you are not part of those privileged animators don’t despair! Squirrely Rig’s creator, Josh Burton, is working on a very very promising character, Morphy, Josh Burton’s morpheus rig.
If you have never heard about it, let me embed some very impressive videos that will certainly make your mouth salivate!
This is seriously impressive I must say and it is amazing how much the rigs keeps its appeal despite the crazy amount of transformation.
I did a very quick test as a tribute to my friends who just wrapped Megamind and I am very pleased with what I was able to achieve in only few minutes.
Nope, that’s not an advert for cosmetics, I just wanted to draw people to two great rig features I can’t live without nowadays: World orient Head and shoulders.
To tell you everything, I also use a complete world orient spine but I will post about this an other time.
In the past I didn’t mind spending countless hours redoing my animation while in polish or even counter-animating things but after few years of production experience, I have adopted some new workflows that are necessary in that type of environments.
Being able to layer finer levels of polish on every part of the body (spine included) at a very late stage, without destroying a head or arm motion is such a helper.
Word orient attributes (Align on the abAutorig) have now become my best friends and if you still don’t know what they are, let me show you an example using Norman
The good thing about that feature is that the curves always make sense in my graph editor. Everything is completely independent from any hierarchy.
With Josh Burton’s Morpheus rig, you would need to set the m_neck_IK__anim parent attribute to m_neck_FK_Cntrl and Follow to all_anim
Before I got into the industry, I was religiously attending every single Autodesk roadshow and in 2006, got to see “Michael the Turtle”, a highly paced music video by french commercial studio “Chez Eddy”, featuring a wacky cartoony turtle, animated in a very Warner brother kind of way, few years before Chicken Little and Madagascar hit the cinemas.
I had been trying to find that video for a long time and eventually found it today on the ….. on the “Chez Eddy” website 😉
The animation might be a bit too much for some but I still love the character and set design, lighting, compositing and the broad animation style. Here it is!
