CARTOON RIGGING  by Ludovic Habas 

For each project, a new challenge

What I like about cartoons is that each project is unique. Whether it's a simple ball of chewing gum or a monster with multiple limbs, each one will have its own lot of complexity and its share of challenge.

Gorillaz G-Shock - Feed Me Light

I was in charge of the rigs of all the main characters and the main alien villain.

The difficulty here was to realize flexible rigs to easily exaggerate the prospects in a relatively short time.

So I used my auto-rig as the main base, but I had to improve the cartoons options of it in order to get more flexibilities in exaggerated poses.

The facial rigs of all the characters were made on a simple common base and with a minimum of animation controllers in order to be able to hold the deadlines.

Safeguard - Feed Me Light

On this project I had to take care of all the rigs of the main characters. If this was relatively standard and did not pose any particular problem, it was not the case of the clouds and drops of water which of simplistic appearance, proved to be much more complex to realize.

Indeed, the drops of water and clouds had to be able to deform to the extreme in order to be able to represent different designs thanks to rig. Eyebrows, teeth and other parts should be able to appear or disappear depending on the chosen design. But the most complex was that an overlay of balls in constant motion on their surface should give them a cloudy appearance. The solution was found thanks to the combination of modifiers at the expense unfortunately of the framerate of these rigs.

TNZPV - Les légandaires

Les légendaires is without a doubt one of the biggest projects I have been entrusted with.

For the story, this series project was started and abandoned by a first studio. It was thus necessary to resume all the characters in their state of progress and to rework them, in particular to redo their rig. More than 150 characters!

The animation was then to be shared between 3 studios (Tu Nous Za Pas Vu, Cube créative and La Station animation).

The TNZPV studio contacted me to manage the rig part with my auto-rig. That allowed to have identical rigs on the 3 studios and to realize all the rigs in time.

Development

One of the worries for this project was that my tools, at that time, were not really suited for the series. So I had to develop a whole range of tools to simplify the management of many characters and animation management. It took two months of work to get a good tool for animators to import their characters, to easily manage the display of this and their controllers, but also to save and share their animations and poses to the team.

Discovering Unity and real time.

Most of my rig work is for precalculated projects. When Nexus contacted me to do rigs for a real-time project on Unity I jumped at the chance. This allowed me to have an experience on this kind of project and to adapt my rigs.

Mighty Nice

Mighty Nice was one of the first studios to trust me. The list of projects on which we collaborated is long and has allowed me to greatly improve my rigs over time and problems encountered.

Pilot priest - Collective Brutus

On this project of clip I had to realize the complete rig of the main character and in particular the rig facial. The freedom that the collective Brutus left me has allowed me to experiment with new techniques at this level.

I was then able to improve these techniques and, on projects allowing it, to propose new systems of facial rig without controllers thus giving a better visibility to the animator.

An example below for a test for the Engine-house studio.