My thoughts on Rigging.

As I proposed before, One Japanese company wanted to see my rigging skill. So I have been working on rigging last 2 weeks. It's been a while since I haven't done much of rigging these days, so I felt rusty. At the same time, I'd learned some of new techniques, so that was really exciting, too.

As my process goes, I just felt my rig sucks. I thought it's pretty cool at some point, but next morning I just feel so bad. It's like drawing or animation. And my presentation is not that good like my friend told me. It was a bit fast fowarded. I sent them a link already, so I hope the company can see what I'm capable of.

Some ppl might see my strong influence on Disney type of rig and GUI. That's true. Since I've been having strong interests on both Technical side and Artistic side of Animation, I have been always searching the way that advances this new medium, in both ways. Then I turned out really positive on the concept of Broken Rig and Bendbow.

It was just a puppet while back when I was in Japan 4 years ago. 3D animator had only ability to rotate some joints, and some IK. But what 2D animators have been doing is not just rotating the joints. They do whatever things to get the shape on the paper. So compared to 2D environment, 3D animator had a huge restriction.

New techniques like Broken Hierarchy or Bendbow has been introduced a while back. And I think this is really great advancement for 3D animation. Althought I haven't broke my rig that much yet, in a good Broken Rig, Animator can easily have the shape that he/she has in their mind. It's more like pencil than puppet. Animator can apply what they know easily, such as Line of Action, Squash and Stretch and Successive Breaking of Joints. I even think Bendbow brings some life into the model.

I think same thing would happen, In next 3 years, we probably see totally different rig. I'm sure that rig would have much less restrictions. As technologies progress, Animator can have more controls, in another word, Animator will have more responsibility to design things on the screen more than now. It's getting close to the pencil IMHO.


Anyways, here goes my reels. for those who haven't checked my latest Animation Reel, I will post it here as well. I noticed things I need to improve, both on Rigging and Animation. So I'm working on it, but always comments are welcome.

Rigging Reel. 46MB Quicktime Sorenson3
Animation Reel. 17MB Quicktime Sorenson3


Sorry for geeky post. I'm tired now. wanna do some Animations, and yeah, drawings!