During Week 9 of our Animated Narratives module, we continued on with working on our character rigs, with the goal of getting them finished to start our animation work over our Easter Break.
Over the past three weeks for this module, we covered over more in depth rigging methods, including empties, vertex groups, weight painting and shape keys. During this week I had taken the information from those lessons and applied them to my model I had rigged early on a couple weeks back. Below are screenshots of my fully rigged model.
Additionally, since my rig was the first to be finished, I had also used OBS to create a small guide video on my model to show its capabilities and restraints in order to help my group members with rigging their own dust bunnies in order for our models to be much easier to work with as a group.
I have recorded a brief showcase video as seen below instead of the original guide I had recorded due to a limit on file size uploads for blog posts. I found using a recorded demonstration video to be more effective at showing the work put into my model, along with its capabilities and restraints, rather than a text based explanation.
Additionally, the video also features a method I had discovered from researching forums online, which allows for the shape keys applied to the dust bunny model to be manipulated via an empty using the driver editor for the main body and the 2D eyes. This was done for when the bunny is sucked up by the vacuum in the animation to give extra squash and stretch to the action. The tail and ear fluff clouds are not effected by the empty as they will be separately keyframed for timing purposes.