Russell Griffith-Marlin
Rigging and Animation Tech Artist
Abyssal Rig
Character modeled and textured
by Vanessa Torres
This is one of my first rigs and really excited to be able to share this epic character! The character is called
Abyssal and was done by a fellow student at Gnomon.
This character was a lot of fun to bring to life!
Each chain... has it's own pole constraint allowing for the chains to get a bit more free animation with the push or pull of those controls along side the main vase mover. You could swing around the vase and actively aim the chain for the desired push and pull poses
While... the body is mainly an FK rig and features some IK bits it was a challenge to get this creature moving to meet the needs of the project!
The helmet... needed to be independent of the body yet also remain attached... So my initial approach was to figure that aspect of the head. I found myself leaning to IK and kept the head joints based from the spine. This allowed for the neck and head to move separately but then came the chains.
For the chains... I ended up using a IK rotate solver using 3 joints I created off the clavicle so they wouldn't be driven off the shoulder but would be driven by the clavicle.
So now... with the IK in I decided to create a control and parent the IK handles in their respective controls. All that was left was to constrain those controls to the helmet head joints I put in place for the chains to be always trying to reach. This gave some really interesting results allowing the head to hit some wild poses.
Each chain... has it's own pole constraint allowing for the chains to get a bit more free animation with the push or pull of those controls along side the main vase mover. You could swing around the vase and actively aim the chain for the desired push and pull poses.
