Land of the Dead

Late last year I was asked by one of my animator Karen Webb to make her a rig for her thesis. At fist she told me that she just wanted standard stuff, a rig that can do things most rig do now days...IK,FK, parent switching, good skinning, decent deformation the usual. And because she wanted very very specific face controls she is even going to do the facial rigging herself. Piece of cake I thought...

Everything was great until she told me that...her character's arms has to be detachable...Oh!? Because it's a zombie girl she said..and this zombie is going to take her own arm off sometime in the middle of story and it would be nice if her rig can let her do that. Um a smooth skinned character with a detachable arm...now that's like my kind of challenge, the good thing was that she gave me the geo to make it happen. A full body geo for a normal rig, a geo with the body but no arm, and a arm with no body. Than 2 different skeleton was build, one for the normal full body, and one for the arm that's going to come off, which is on top of the normal full body. The system work kind of like parent switching but on a skinning level. It wasn't as bad as I thought.

So in the spirit of the new year and soon coming of 2012 which I hope is a end of the world. And if it's really the end, I hope it's a Zombie outbreak, because zombie overun isn't a bad way for humans to go...so here is the Zombie Grl Rig and ::SPOILERs for Karen's Thesis:: The zombie girl is the main character's girl friend before she was a zombie...weird....

Zombie Grl Rig from zhentingzhou on Vimeo.