Aug 6, 2007

Four Legs are Your Legs!

I am one of these lucky guys who gets to work with a really great Technical Animation Director - Javier Solsona, or "Goosh" as you may know of him. This guy has been connecting, constraining, multiply dividing and parenting for years! and can teach us all a thing or two about how to make a decent rig. In fact, he kicked off the whole "free rig" thing with the release of "PackageMan" a few years back. When Goosh pulls out his nurbs controllers, you know he's a man not to be reckoned with!

Well.. after a lot of headaches and hard work, Goosh has released an new quadruped rig that is freely available for download from Highend3D.com ... if you're going to Siggraph this year, make sure you check out his three part masterclass, that will give you a priceless insight into how it was created.

I worked closely with Goosh during the development of this rig ( despite the fact he did all the work of course ) and I can guarantee you he pushes "animator friendly" and "functionality" to the limit. He is constantly looking to give the animator all the control he needs - whilst seamlessly removing the brain ache factor for you in the background.

Go download it and have a play around. The link below gives a little more detail on what you're getting ( there are a few minor restrictions )... but check it out and be sure to post comments about what you think!

Advanced Quadruped Rig



( yeah I know I used this animation before on this Blog - but come on.. this one's rendered ! )

13 comments:

Marcus said...

That's pretty awesome! Thanks for sharing :)
~Marcus

Marin Petrov said...

Goosh have been extremely helpfull trough the years on the rigging and animation forums. And he pointed me to your blog btw :) Good for you he is doing masterclasses this year! Go GO GOOSH!!!

Henk said...

Having rigged two cats without any tutorial, its awesome to see such an awesome quadruped rig. It deforms beautifully and quite predictive.

Id`ve loved an option to have a smoothskinned version because it reads better, nonetheless. Ill seriously consider doing a nice walkcycle it eventually

Henk said...

Forgot to mention how fun that cycle is, studied it a bit, love how the energy center is all in his chest, very goofy and energetic. Awesome

DJ said...

This is awsome. So cool of goosh for doing this. hearty thanks to him. please convey him all our thankfulness.

DJ

Anonymous said...

Thanks guys!

Yeah... total praise to Goosh for such a powerful rig.

It was mentioned about a smooth skinned version... yes its true that the rig only contains proxy geometry that is unbound. It is in the plan for a future release to include a proper skinned body, and hopefully an all new facial setup.

Goosh said...

Oh? is it? imagine that!

Mmnn.. I guess I'll get to it sometime/day/year :S

Hope you guys enjoy the rig, but it's really cam working the magic, you could give him the crappiest rig ever and his animations will still be kick ass..

RVG said...

great stuff, checked it on highend3d and Im now really wondering how will the completed version of the rig look like.

Would it be possible to see any evidence of the development process for this rig? eg. character designs, thumbnails of extreme poses that might have been challenging to achieve in 3d, interface/controls design...? Not meaning to push this topic towards rigging but is interesting to see how an animator friendly rig would be developed, since it's always in mind to be "for the Animator"...

Goosh n Cameron many thanks for sharing!

Bartek said...

Hot damn guys! That's one sexy rig. This is exactly the IK/FK balanced setup I like working with in production for a quadruped character.

Thank you Goosh for sharing and Cam, I won't even go into telling you how fun that cycle is! ;)

Dennis DeMercer said...

This great, but I don't have maya 8. I really wanted to thank you for the shotView thingie! I've been using that everyday. It's rad!

Lluís Llobera said...

Nice stuff Goosh & Cam :-)

HOOONK -

Lluís

Darrias Campbell said...

Did you animate a camera circling around the dog or is that dog actually moving on a plane? I think the presentation of how it's being shown is amazing and would like to bring that into my own cycles.

Cameron Fielding said...

hello '3ds max elements' ... yes I created a super easy camera rig that just has the rotation centre placed at the location of the dog. Because there is no background to reference against, I can just rotate the rig and i get a nice clean circle all the way around to show the cycle from a few different angles in a cohesive way.