Rig demos

I thought i'd add a couple rig demonstrations to show off the rigs capabilities a bit.

Turntable

The animations and turntable video is now completed, honestly I would have liked to put more time into the animations to make them look a lot better than they do now, but as animating was not an essential part of my proposal I don't feel too bad about leaving them as they are now.

Passes

With all of the rigging out of the way I can now just focus on the presentation of my project. 

I have already tidied up each project folder to have only the necessary  files and without any extra data slowing it down, so they are now ready to be handed in as a finished product. I'm currently working on a turntable video to showcase the two characters, and if i've got time i'll throw in some hastily made animations too.

The various passes that will be on show, textured, ambient occlusion and wireframe.

Podium

quickly threw together a podium for the characters to stand on in their turntable debut.

Facial Rigging

Facial rigging for the Referee is now complete, here you can see the various lattices, clusters and controllers used to animate his face. The brow controls have a lot more impact on this character as opposed to the Luchador because of his eyebrows.

Fleshy Eye Rig

I just implemented a 'Fleshy Eye' Expression to both my character rigs, this means that the eyelid joints are driven by the direction that the eye joint is looking, making the eyelids deform as the character looks around. It gives the characters a lot more realism in their animation.

Mirror Weights Tool

While skinning the referee I had a number of problems with the mirror skin weights tool no matter what options I tried to fix them. Weights were not being mirrored accurately and in many cases the previously painted weights were being overwritten causing a lot of lost work time. Eventually after a lot of hassle and painting weights for both sides individually the problem seemed to subside somewhat and now the mirror weight tool works for the most part...

Referee rigging!

Lots of updates of my rigging with the referee which I now still have to finish the facial rigging but his skeletal rig is officially complete! 

  Spine rigging complete, same as the Luchador.

Finished rigging his feet, eyes and shoudlers. I'm about to add hand controllers.

 Here I've added extra joints to control the referee's ears, the Luchador rig had no ears so this is new for me, but simple orient and point contraints worked fine.

Finished skeletal rig, onward to facial rigging!

Finished Wrestler Rig

The rig for the Luchador is now completed, I can move onto the Referee's rig now.

Facial Rigging

With limited time left I have opted against facial rigging using blend shapes and instead will just be using joint / lattice based deformers to create expression.

Here are the lattices attached to the upper jaw, along with their clusters which are used to deform the lattice.

I then created these controllers and parented them to their respective clusters to create a means to control the lattices while still being able to 0 out deformation with ease.