Belmont
Personal Work
This started as a model project by Annie Kwon. I reached out to her because of a tweet and from there we started collaborating.
It started with just a simple decimated mesh out of Zbrush to create the layout of the joints and the rig while Annie continued fixing the character + textures.
In this project I added the new setups from the R&D i had done to see how they would hold up:
For the skirt I added the extra option to remove the collision so all the chains in the skirt can be manipulated as a normal fk setup.
The most challenging part of R&D in this setup is most likely the morningstar setup. It is built on top of the rail spline setup, which allows all the links to rotate based on the control position. The spline then has a limit to where the joints are able to move. If the joint is positioned at the start it will use the length of the next joint to see if it needs to be scaled up to meet the next link.
The chain is built and skinned in stretched position with 10 controls in total. Most of these controls are hidden using the offsetgroup to place it direcetly on the base control. An attribute is able to add these extra controls in the setup if needed, if not all controls are necessary the animator can use the attribute to remove them so they are not used.
Then an extra attribute is in place so the chain can still slide over the placed curve, so the chain can extend based on the animators needs.
This all needed to work closely together with the scaling of the entire morningstar rig, so lots of corrective scaling is used to make it work.