Having had prior experience with bi-ped rigs I knew I wanted to make a more complicated version that would feature additional functionality, I began on a simple bone structure which would take some guess work as although the skeletons are all disjointed bones, the movement being at the split in geometry could cause clipping as parts might rotate into each other I also planned on using a full rig system for the face to allow facial animation similar to Coco but was advised because of the complications that might arise I’d be better looking at blendshapes. After I designed a custom controller style using the Wingdings font and Mayas 3d text feature before converting it into a controller curve (this was just for stylistic choice to make the controllers faster), by making it a unique shape and colour it meant me and Conor would not get confused as to what the main controller was, this logic was used for the difference between the Ik/Fk controller as well when making the left and right side of the FK red/blue and the IK controllers being a different colour entirely. I set up the Controllers to turn on and off at the flick of a switch to keep the scene less cluttered this would make animating from a side view easier and more easily readable. I then finalised the rigs by adding layers to remove the visibility and control of anything that could break the rig such as the effectors and locators as they are selected first in Mayas hierarchy and there for when selecting controllers, it only selects them first. Understanding how to add finger controls proved rather tedious as the only method I found worked was bringing a locator that would move between both positions when the Ik/Fk switch was enabled as other methods seemed to cause issues such as having 2 sets of finger controls (Maya’s controllers seemed to break when duplicated and setting up a join chain for fingers two times would take a lot longer). The only major issue this caused was the need to manually turn off the visibility of controllers before starting to animate a scene as it would cause the fingers to not animate.

 

The variation between the Death and regular skeletons was focused specifically on the head and therefore I replaced the skull and rebound the joints without issue so I made the base skeletons rig completely and revisited the death skull and renames the joints after the fact, although the addition of blendshapes proved difficult as some issues arrived, these issues were the result of me freezing transformation information of the individual alterations but upon redoing the binding it fixed it as I didn’t know this would cause Issue it took some trouble shooting. I then attached the geometry to the rigs so the skulls were there in case I needed some alterations or additional added etc. Death’s rig featured a controller that was used for the pieces of his skull to animate floating so all blendshaped were bound to that but the main skeletons didn’t have anything clear enough and thus I designed a unique controller to sit upon the head to only Animate blendshapes.

 

Tom’s rig was the first quadrupled rig I had ever attempted, with the help of a tutorial series provided by Alec I began working on it. Following this guide was very helpful but select parts cause issues with the rig such as the stretchy spine as this caused a strange double transformation on the spine causing it to rotate when the master controller was moved forwards, I looked to see if there was a section I was missing but as I couldn’t the stretch in the spine working I searched up common issues but didn’t find any solid answers I was able to remove the binding and set up a new cluster chain which although did not. When making this rig I had neglected to add a mouth cavity to the model and thus would lose any potential to Animate facial expressions, because tom was supposed to meow I needed to take the time modelling again and adding one. I quickly modelled a mouth and retopologised the model to allow him to Animate better in maya as his high poly count crashed the scene more than a few times. The weight painting took a long time to properly work out, I initially looked into hammered skins weights which provided a great base but was incompatible with the clusters and caused issues so therefore had to do them again then once more after correcting the rig etc. Copy skin weights didn’t work properly, mirror skin weights only worked on certain joints. 

 

Once the models were complete, I began work on animation tests, mainly focusing on walk cycles and general movement tests. The skeletal rigs used the same ordering and naming conventions, so I was able to test on one and quickly copy the key frames across, this helped me notice a few slight issues with my rig mainly consisting of skin weight issues which I was able to correct. The Quadruped rig featured significantly more issues especially with skin weight and there for took a long-time trouble shooting to better understand what was going wrong, after rebuilding specific section if the rig from scratch I was able to fix issues that mainly consisted of translation or hierarchy placement. Since scene 2 however is using a ground plane from Unreal Engine so in favour of making the walk style line up easier I finalised the layout and design within Unreal to get the ground plane imported into maya with some markers to better align with where some shots needed placed.

 

Animation was a simple process of either gathering reference and animating or acting out reference to understand the twist and turns it had on me etc. And repeating that on the skeleton’s models, the Tom rig being a Cat meant I could only rely on reference videos or observing how my own cats moved and reacted in certain situations.

 

I made a quick scroll that Death would use for his list of names then got a series of blend shapes set up to role it up and extra Controllers to allow overlapping action as he flicks it open. I made a rig for the boat and lantern models so they would be combined and pivot from the correct points to save time counter animating such as the lantern pivot being located underneath its rest on the wooden plinth and the boat pivoting from the exact same position of Death so they can be animated together without needing to rearrange hierarchy. I also made a single bone and controller rig for the coin as key framing the geometry seemed like a bad idea.

 

 

After this I also went back into marvelous designer to work on how I could improve the cloak, I first had to learn how to make a fitting suit to better fill in the voids between the bones to prevent clipping this although not perfect stopped issues arriving after animations was applied. I also looked into creating a better cloak template that didn’t feel as tight around Death and allowed a more carefree feel rather than feeling uncomfortable, afterwards I decided to look into a zip for the cloak as it provided the best result without creating a pinching effect on the model and when made smaller the zip wasn’t very noticeable.

 

I took the cloak into Substance painter in hopes to create a coloured version that didn’t feel too daunting as making a black or midnight blue/purple felt cliche. I applied the prior techniques and made 2 separate versions and chose the one that I felt fit better which was my first attempt as the colour palette in these used tones of blue consistent with the Tom model to show through the appearance that Death and Tom have some sort of understanding with each other. The second used the purple but focused on a more worn and weathered effect (I also made a third using a more forest colour palette but didn’t like the results).

 

Although disheartening at this point I was advised to cut down the animations due to time constraints so I worked on another version of the I felt I could tell a clear version of my story by reordering the sequence of events and cutting a minute of footage making the overall length of the short 2 minutes instead of 3 (although this was advised to be 1 minute 30 I felt this removed to much of the story to complete). Because sound was going to be a bigger point in our short Conor was tasked with reaching out to Chris McCann , Chris informed us we were slow in contacting him (I asked Conor to email multiple times sooner but task priority meant he didn’t) but it wasn’t too late and that he would do the sound design for our film meaning it would be a lot easier to edit at the end. I continued gathering reference to Animate the “new” scenes (the new animatic order) but thankfully I was able to recycle a few of them such as the death rowing animation which was used 4 times within the short. Tom’s jump scene was used 2 times, and some already started scenes were adjusted to save time instead of starting from scratch. This did however lead to things being retimed as it felt fast in some parts and slow in others, so I made one last version of the animatic to account for this before getting ready to move things into unreal.