Models and Rigging Examples

This page demonstrates my skills in creating character models and animation rigging controls. I really enjoy the process of taking a character concept from the drawing table all the way to a finished, animated character. If you're a rigger, I hope you come away with a few new ideas.

If you've seen the classic 1989 horror film Pumpkinhead, then you know what an utterly cool and original-looking creature he is. He was designed by Stan Winston's company. I love the design of the monster and I wanted to re-create it as faithfully as I could.

I needed a pretty large amount of reference to create such a fearsome beast. McFarlane Toys makes a Pumpkinhead figure, which I used to get the basic form. Unfortunately, the figure lacks some detail when it comes to modeling small features like the mouth and the teeth. So I also used screen captures from the film's DVD.

With the references I used, I was able to model a good approximation for the monster's body. I used Maya 6.5 to do all the work here.

With the mesh and texturing complete, I was ready to begin creating his skeleton. While the upper body is fairly straightforward, this monster has a leg setup that I've never done before. He's a digitigrade creature, which just means that his legs have an extra bone in them. It's as if his lower leg bone is a stretched-out foot bone, and he's walking on his toes. I tried a few elaborate setups to handle the IK in the 3-bone link, but the best solution is the easiest one. I just used an IK handle on the 3 bones together.

I got most of the rigging techniques from a great book, Inspired 3D Character Setup. Referring to a book speeds up the process when you can see all the steps at once.

I built the skeleton and created the NURBS control boxes that I will use to animate him.

To control his fingers, I created an expression that allowed me to drive finger rotation from the attributes that are added to a locator. The locator is a sibling of the arms' control boxes, meaning that you can pick-walk over to them when transforming the arms. The nice thing about pick-walking is that the selection mask for locators doesn't even need to be active.

Some stuff I learned while modeling:

1. The McFarlane model had larger feet than the film creature. Obviously, because the figure had to stand up! I used the smaller feet.

2. The sculptors at McFarlane missed a small detail: Pumpkinhead has a tail spike! I spotted it in a screengrab and added it to my model.

3. The skullplates on the front of the monster's head mimic human anatomy. I saw this while looking at my little daughter's growing head.

I had to lay out the UV coordinates with the UV Texture editor. I like to use Maya's automatic mapping method. It creates coordinates that are planar to the mesh surface. It's great for organic meshes.

To create Pumpkinhead's textures, I used the video footage from the film and some photos I found online of the monster suit. It's actually pretty hard to find good photos of the suit. The video captures are all filmed at night and lit by lightning. It was pretty difficult to get good readings of the skin color. I made a texture for the head and one for the body. Using my Wacom tablet, I painted the body's muscles and textures.

I really wanted to build a cool-looking egyptian mummy model. I got the idea from visiting the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, which houses a real mummy on display. I did some research on Egyptian pharoahs and what they wore. I looked up some weaponry and decided to use a long, curved bladed sword called a Khopesh. I did a pen and ink drawing of what I wanted to make. I named him Imhotep the Heretic.

I also made a character model sheet to use as an image plane to help with his modelling.

All of this is pretty straightforward so far, but I tried a few new techniques that I thought worked really well. I learned how to use expressions much more, and automated blendshapes.

The first custom expression I needed was for the strange protrusions you see coming out of his shoulders. I call them shoulder spires. The spires have a little rigidity that make them not inherit all of the rotation of the arm. The film's creature suit shows this. So I wrote an expression that lets the spire bones get just a percentage of the upper arm's rotation.

Blendshapes are just like morph targets in other software packages. They are a copy of your base mesh, with some changes in deformation. I automated the blendshapes so that I didn't need to manually move their sliders. I made a blendshape for Pumpkinhead's biceps that will increase the bicep's size as the lower arm rotates. (see below.)

Another blendshape that I made was for the deformation of the monster's footpads. Now this feature I added because it would add to his sense of weight. After seeing some camels walking around at the San Diego zoo, I was intrigued by the size of their footpads. The bulbous, calloused pads look like they are walking around on balloons. Pummpkinhead's feet really resemble camel feet and I bet the people at Winston's studio used them as a source of reference.

The blendshape is a copy of the body mesh with the footpads deformed. (not just flattened, but the sides pushed out as well.) The blendshape's value is driven by the custom attribute on the foot's control box. I called the attribute 'padsquish'.

The monster's head has several blendshapes. There are two for the brows down, and two for the sneering. The blendshapes are driven by custom attributes on the head bone. I also added a control to open his mouth with a custom attribute.

This collects all the controls for everything on the head into one place.

Notice that for the head I didn't use a NURBS control box. I don't like to use them if I don't need to. I'd much rather use handles on bones instead.