Ooops! Noah is gone...

This is a contract work for the best and nicest company I worked so far. They are called Pictorion-Magma and specialized on 2D and 3D Movies/Series. I have to admit it was the company with the longest working hours I ever had, but that was due to typical deadline stress and you never felt pissed. They are such a nice team and don't put you under pressure, so it was a very great time even when the sun was long gone. I want to thank the company and the awesome crew for this amazing experience. Thank you so much and keep up the fantastic work!

For Noah I had to create a rig. It was for the main character and should be production proof. Time schedule were two weeks and that is for this task, even for me, impossible :)

So I decided together with the animators to start with an Autorig and adjust it. We picked a nice one, AbAutoRig, and I put lot's of extensions to it so they feel comfortable with it in no time as they just finished another production. So I tweaked all the parameters that they will be at the same places, do the same thing, controls look the some etc.

Headsetup couldn't be automated at all. So I spent the two weeks more or less to create a fancy facial/head setup. The proboscis (nose) has various stages. It can be switched between IK and FK and even has several complexity stages. If the nose has to be rolled together it needs to be very complex, but also has lot's of controls. For the most parts the nose just needed to swing around a little bit and didn't need that many controls, so you switch to a lower complexity level. That was very tricky to achieve and is even blendable, but was worth the effort.

For the face I used lattices and clusters. What I did exactly is too unique, so I don't want to go too much into detail here. In the end you had dozenz of parameters to adjust the face wich were simply way too many for the animators. Goro Fujita found a nice plugin that handles that problem, he is one hell of an awesome animator. The only reason why I went into paramter frency at all. It's called poseLib and what you do is pretty simple. You torture yourself through all the parametersetting to create the shape for the face you want to have and then make a "screenshot" of it. It saves all the important parameters, even creates a real little screenshot and puts them in some sort of shelf.

This saved the process of creating all the blendshapes needed for this character. In the end it was enough to create 4 blendshapes for very unique facial situations, like the inflated cheaks.

Company was happy, animators were happy, trailer is great, I am happy.

Let's hug the world and get a bunch of sleep :)