Sprite Fright is the new Open Movie, now in production. In this post, Demeter Dzadik, the film’s rigger, explains the challenges he faced working on the film’s snail.
This is part two of a series on rigging Sprite Fright’s creatures. You can find part one here.
Met says, “Out of the all the forest creatures, the snails have my favourite personality. They are just chilling, man. Squashing and stretching like on a lazy Sunday.”
While the snail rigs required some support for facial performance, they didn’t need nearly as much work as Sprite Fright’s main cast. Met explains, “The snails got a very simple chain setup for their mouths and eyelids. This permits a decent range of poses but isn’t necessarily super convenient to animate. Still, we gave it a couple rounds of iteration in order to make it fairly nice to control, and to allow the mouth to slide quite far to the sides of the face.”
Besides organizational controls around the snail’s face, Sprite Fright’s animators also wanted to make the snail look like it’s attached to a surface. “At first, I added an Action set-up to the ‘leg’ bones already present at the bottom of the snail, which helped to flatten the bottom part. This gave a nice shape but not enough control, so on top of that we also added a lattice setup that covers the entire snail. Finally, one more lattice was needed for a few frames in which Rex pulls a snail from his face, and we wanted the snail's body to stretch with its shell as Rex is pulling on it.”
While Sprite Fright will be full of snails and other creatures, Met has a couple of regrets. “Sadly, some of the best snail facial expressions are likely not going to make it into the film, but that is to be expected. Still, if you want to see them, make sure to check out Rik's animation posts in our production logs.”
For more of Met’s ideas on rigging, click here.
I would love to have a fully explained tutorial how to make this rig from scratch in Blender Cloud, or any character for that matter.... some day..... sigh
@Manu Järvinen There is this one from Settlers! https://cloud.blender.org/films/settlers/5e834b63dd1fa9d76bf2e7aa/?asset=2577 As Sprite Fright gets closer to release, some of the simpler characters might also get similar style videos from me. I will probably be staying away from the main characters though because there a lot of satanic solutions were used. Way too much satanicism to show the world.
@Demeter Dzadik Yay, an answer! :) Thanks. I'll make sure to watch that Pip-video. I try to gather as much cartoony character rigging knowledge as I can.
Too bad, I would be most interested in the satanic solutions ;) You made the rigs work, so....would love to know how - and in detail
Thanks again!
Can you please share the technique used in the mouth of the Snail? How it is moving here and there in the body? Is it using help of another mesh with boolean (difference) modifier or some other lattice technique? really getting mad thinking about it. Wonderful idea.
@Krishnan Potti Close, actually. It's using the same tech as the main characters, just with a lot less polish: There is a helper mesh that is a copy of the snail's head, but this helper mesh is only deformed by the main head bone and it is not deformed by the mouth controls. Then, the real snail mesh snaps to this helper using a Shrinkwrap modifier.
Thanks to the granular dependency graph, this doesn't result in a dependency cycle, since the helper mesh doesn't depend on the entire armature object, only the bones that deform it. If any of the mouth bones were to deform the helper mesh, there would be a cycle and everything would explode. :)
The Rig is highly complicated.. Thanks for sharing this. Though Snail is not having that much body parts, Its really amazing to see the Rig making it fantastically flexible with all type of actions.
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