I started rigging my now textured model for animating. One of the good things about choosing to animate snails is that their rigs are quite simple – the main body can be one chain of joints, there’s no limbs to rig. The antennae were still a little complicated, but overall I think a snail was a good choice for inexperienced animators.

I didn’t have much experience with rigging, so I followed a tutorial from blackboard to help me figure it out. I used the joint tool to create a chain of joints from the snail’s tail to his head, then created NURBs curves for the controllers. I positioned the controllers over their respective joints, froze the transformation, deleted the history, and parented them. I repeated this process, branching the chain out from the head into the four antennae.

To make the mesh move with the rig, I selected the bottom of the joint chain and then shift-selected the snail model. I then opened the skin menu and chose “bind skin”. This allowed me to use the controls to move my snail. I was having issues with my lower antennae (they were deforming at strange angles), but after some trial and error one of my group members was able to help me fix it.

Another issue I had was that the model’s eyeball and eyebrows would not move in sync with the rest of the body – they would detach when I tried to move the rig. I tried parenting them to NURBs curves directly (rather than via a joint), then parenting those curves with the rest of the rig, but it didn’t fix the issue. I also tried reskinning the model after adding joints and controllers for the eyeball and brows, but they still moved out of sync. After trying these methods again a few times and asking my group for advice, I emailed a tutor about the issue and he was able to fix it.

Now that I had my joints and controllers finished, I started working on the blend shapes. I wanted to have some blend shapes so I could easily switch the character’s expressions, this was especially important since there were going to be multiple close up shots of this character’s face. Alec had recorded a tutorial on how to add blend shapes to a NURBs curve so the shapes could be controlled without opening a new window, so I followed along carefully to create the expressions.

I cloned the snail’s body and unlocked the transformations, then moved it to the side a little to work on it and renamed it appropriately. Using the vertex tool with soft selection on, I manipulated the face into the desired expression. I selected the new expression and shift-selected the main model, then opened the deform menu and picked the blend shape option. On a NURBs circle, I added an attribute for my expression then went into the key menu and chose “set driven key”. I selected the NURBs circle and chose “load driver”, then selected the blend shape and chose “load driven”.  I set keys for my blendshape at 1 and 10 on the control, then I was able to control the blendshape with a transformation control on the NURBs circle.

I gave the model three expressions – closed mouth, smiling, and shocked/frowning. I was able to create different expressions by using a mixture of these three, for example I could set closed mouth and smile to a value of 5 each to get a closed smile expression.

I moved my rig about in different poses to test if it was working, then saved it and moved on to the animating phase.