Rigging Gollum/Smeagol ?

[seven6ty]

Well, it's hard to give you any tips without knowing any of the specific problems you're having and whatnot. Do you have any pay allotment for a rigger/set-up person at all?

I wouldn't have very high expectations if it's going to be a person's first time setting up and animating a character, as it definently takes a good amount of practice and familiarizing yourself with the process and many different approaches you can take.

[eek]

Ok,

If you want to build it similiar to the Gollum setup, its gunna take time. Firstly Gollum has a real world skeletal setup, a muscle setup, a facial setup. There rig is very nice. I saw a vid a while back, in which they had fk/ik arms, and a pseudo isner/fk spine setup. Additional to this interactive LODing.

Theres a few questions im gunna ask you:

How many animators do you have, and are they familiar with rigging?

Rigging depends a lot on your pipeline, do you want the animator to see hipoly versions, do you want them to work on a low poly rig then bake animation onto the render model.

Do you want the character to have the same performance as LOTR i.e extreme twists, pinnable hands and feet.

Is the rig gunna be tweakable for the animators?, or is it a one off?

Is this a completely animated feature? or are you doing live action combinations?



To rig a Gollum character for a feature woud take me quite a bit of time, firstly i would read through the entire script and storyboards, understand exactly what the character needs to do. THen on that basis build the rig.

Ive done a few rigs like this, mainly game work, but with all manner of things: wings, tails, etc etc.

The key to rigging, is the animators needs, and performance. For a character like gollum you want the quickest results for the animators feedback. I would float off the facial onto a seperate layer, or even rig so the animators could concentrate on body then facials. Maybe a clever export script of even xref.

eek

[captainboom]

I can't add anything that eek has not already, but takeing on the task of rigging a character like gollum.is a major one ........... All I can offer is this ...read this book.

http://www.tolkientown.com/shop/product_info.php/products_id/1562

it should help put you in the mind set of taclking a character like gollum...

laterCaptainboom

[MystikGotan]

Ok,

If you want to build it similiar to the Gollum setup, its gunna take time. Firstly Gollum has a real world skeletal setup, a muscle setup, a facial setup. There rig is very nice. I saw a vid a while back, in which they had fk/ik arms, and a pseudo isner/fk spine setup. Additional to this interactive LODing.

Theres a few questions im gunna ask you:

How many animators do you have, and are they familiar with rigging?

Rigging depends a lot on your pipeline, do you want the animator to see hipoly versions, do you want them to work on a low poly rig then bake animation onto the render model.

Do you want the character to have the same performance as LOTR i.e extreme twists, pinnable hands and feet.

Is the rig gunna be tweakable for the animators?, or is it a one off?

Is this a completely animated feature? or are you doing live action combinations?



To rig a Gollum character for a feature woud take me quite a bit of time, firstly i would read through the entire script and storyboards, understand exactly what the character needs to do. THen on that basis build the rig.

Ive done a few rigs like this, mainly game work, but with all manner of things: wings, tails, etc etc.

The key to rigging, is the animators needs, and performance. For a character like gollum you want the quickest results for the animators feedback. I would float off the facial onto a seperate layer, or even rig so the animators could concentrate on body then facials. Maybe a clever export script of even xref.

eek

Well, thanks for the reply's guys. Thought I already replied but then my sister or somebody else clicked away the browser when the server was too busy.

Eek, thanks a lot for your great reply. I know Gollum would take great effort only to rig it. Basically what we need is just a skeletal set-up, facial setup, muscle setup, etc is not essential (would be nice though). And no, we don't need a Gollum like in LotR. We just need a basic Gollum, because we want to do some things other way, we could use live action actors, but it wouldn't really have the same effect when doing it digitally. It's not really about making Gollum realistic, more doing it digitally, and trying to amaze people that it was all done digitally.

The film will be live action based. We're almost done with the script, just rewriting the first parts to that the first part (before setting off for our journey) will be a comedy (or comedy based). We're also busy Storyboarding the scenes we would like to be Storyboarded.

We've already gained quite some progress in the pre-production, we've done most of the script, conceptualised many things, and we're looking for locations atm. We live in Holland but we would like to shoot in Scotland because of the amazing landscapes.

I'm not extremely familiar with rigging but I will do the animating. I will try to get some more animators as well, but fact is that Gollum won't be showing up in the first part of LotM much. He will just have a character intro and we will try to show the nature of his excistence/being.

Hoping this is enough information for you,

Thanks in advance...,

Gotan

PS. You could always email me or MSN me @ da_gotan@hotmail.com

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