rigging showreel 2008

[kcinobro]

Very impressive. I would love to animate those rigs!

[StSabath]

nice reel,awesome stuff,liked it from start to finish..

[philippeduvin]

What am I supposed to say ?? This is awesomeeeeee !! everybody this man is a true genius in rigging and super warm dude.
Five Stars !!

ps : thanks for fixing our production rigs during 18 months at AS and save some of my animations ;)

[MikeYork]

Yo Christopher,

Awesome rigging reel man.. I would love to animate on those rigs and I really like your editing and music of your demo reel I actually listen to that song all the time :) and I also like the way you presented your stuff very clean and simple and easy to understand.

Keep up the great work... Now I just need to get a version of XSI :)

[grafi]

Nice reel man, looks like those rigs would be really fun to use, and nice integrated shots :)

[Izzyw]

that was impressive. Some great rigs, wish i could get my hands on those.

[Nate Wheeler]

Great Stuff. What program did you use to make your rig

[chindian]

Wow - very kool! This is definitely one of the stronger XSI rigging reels i've seen... Very nice automated setup!! I love the fact that you can go back and adjust it! Great work man!

[ChristopherC]

Thanks to all of you for your comments, I'm glad that you like it !

Nate Wheeler: everything is done with Softimage|XSI

[Memodin]

This is realy great! and i think its a front page art...

Congrats my man...

[Nate Wheeler]

Thanks. Now Im going to have to learn a hole new program. Im loosing my hair.

[MrBizzle]

I really enjoyed this reel, thank you for posting. Great editing. Did you edit yourself?

[PureMoxi]

nice work...dig the XSI show on here :)

[CoolCalb]

Excellent Demo Reel! I love the facial rig animation test, especially her mouth region.

5 stars from me ;)

[RobertoOrtiz]

Great work!

Plugged!

-R

[Algorithmic]

WOW! Amazing stuff, I love the train and the animated scene with the little girl, it was extremely convincing, and her last expression made me laugh. Great job!

[jobesu]

That´s the best rigging Reel i have ever seen!!
The reel was very well done itself and the content was amazing!!
all stars!

[Heber]

Awesome reel!
Those rigs make me want to try to animate (again).
Nice way to present their use in production too , i like the idea.
:)

[gotonextframe]

Nice reel and impressive work

[KSteineman]

Sweet deal man, great work, keep it up :)

[grundelboy]

Your rigging Kung Fu is strong.
That has to bee the most impressive rigging reel I've scene since PEN.

[philippeduvin]

hehe Je te l'avais dis que tu serais vite plugged :) congratuations dude !

[gout]

I watch something like this and realize I know nothing. Fantastic showcase for your abilities and work.

I'm off to buy the magic roundabout on DVD now.

[hrgiger]

What a great reel. I knew there was a reason I switched to XSI.

[Larry_g1s]

Great job. I really like the demonstration and music with it, very easy and entertaining to watch.

[pimeto]

XSI poweR!!
wonderfull rigs you got theare!!
are you using some plugins, or it is all made by you ? :)

[Strang]

great job christopher!

the presentation was a great way to separate yourself from other rigging reels

[far]

very fine top quality work :)

[TYGAR]

Not to sound - but,what was so great about that,I have seen more complex rigging show reels on here before,don't get me wrong it's better than I can do,but I just don't see what was so good about it,maybe it's just my ignorance toward rigging.

[debfrey]

:bowdown:

Suh-weet stuff, man.

If you took the time to explain your techniques in video, I think you'd have a hit!

That facial rig in particular was crazy-great. Loved the control rig, too. Just so good!

How long to rig a full char from scratch?

Congrats again.

D

[ooorc46]

hi,christopher

Are the links dead, cause I can't access them.

I can't access your website too.

Can't wait to see your reel, since it stunned so many people.

[ASWDesign]

Had a ball watching amazing stuff loved every second. Very professional.

[DuttyFoot]

hey chris your reel is one of the best rigging reels i have seen in a very long time. very inspiring :bowdown:
i can just imagine how much fun it would be to animate with one of your rigs.
oh, and one more thing, i love the photos on your site :cool:

[mkapfhammer]

Awesome stuff!

I really dig the IK solver plane icon you added. Makes things nice. :)

Who are your rigging influences?

[wamo]

This is wonderfull dude!
i like it alot,your auto rig,seems to be alot of hard work!congrates!

[danb]

Very nice reel. Would have liked to see more on the generate adaptable rig doohicky thing. :) Also some secondary soft dynamics effects, aka. jiggly. I didn't see much of that in the reel.

Do you ever do extreme toon facial rigs? Squash/stretch and all that on the head while maintaining the facial setup?

[samartin]

Wow, while I appreciate rigging reels this one just seem to be jaw dropping to me!

Very nice work and the finished scenes due to your setups look fantastic :o) I guess you animated these shorts too?

[ChristopherC]

I'm really suprised by the frontpage and all this comments makes me very happy, I didn't expected such great feedbacks. Thank you so much everyone !

MrBizzle: yes, I've done all the editing myself.
RobertoOrtiz: thanks ! :)
pimeto: I'm not using any external plugin, everything is done by myself.
debfrey: I'm not sure I will have time for tutorials, but I'll try. The most time I spent on a rig was about 1 month on the Tinman from the Wizard of Oz. But for less complex characters, without any rigging automation, it usually takes 1 or 2 weeks.
ooorc46: Perhaps a little overload of the server ? All is working fine right now.
mkapfhammer: I owe a lot to Frédéric Bonometti, my supervisor at ActionSynthese, but I don't really have any rigging influence, I'm for the most part self-taught.
danb: nope, never had to do that.
wamo: 3 intenses weeks of work for the whole stuff (excluding synoptic and generation of the springy tail).
samartin: no animation, just rigging.

[bleumoon]

Wow, what an outstanding reel. Those rigs just beg to be animated; and when they were they were so beautiful in motion. Thanks for sharing.

[Aseemta]

Wow that was awesome and i am sure they must be really good rigs to work with.. congrats..
cheers

[AIR]

I was allways wondering how do they achive that nice animations in big studio pics, like Horton hears a Who,, now i know how,, cos they had somebody like CristopherC :)

Amazing 1st rig.

[danb]

Very nice reel. Would have liked to see more on the generate adaptable rig doohicky thing. :)

I just realised these are CAT rigs, right? That's what the "generate" button is for, yes?

I forgot XSI has the CAT plugin in it. That must be nice to be able to work with those rigs plus make them customized through XSI's scripting.

Do your custom rigs also work with CAT's walk cycles generator?

[Sniffet]

Seriously top notch stuff!! Its damn cool to see such great rigs in XSI! Yesterday I felt my rigs where pretty decent.. Today I feel that they are utterly crap!

[ChristopherC]

danb: CAT isn't used at all, everything is hand-coded. I thought CAT was only available withing 3DSMax ?

[luiso]

Yeah, your reel is amazing!!!

Rigs like yours make me think in a lot of possibilties in animation and characters design.
Real good job!

[danb]

danb: CAT isn't used at all, everything is hand-coded. I thought CAT was only available withing 3DSMax ?

Yes, sorry my mistake. :(

I had thought that because XSI bought CAT that it was now used in Softimage, and not in max. Plus the use of the blocks in your rig look a lot like the CAT rig. On top of that, your autorigger behaves a lot like what i've seen from CAT. From all that and the "generate" button i jumped to the wrong conclusion.

[Hasnz]

very impressive !

[zenonithus]

really nice! is your facial rig bones? blendshapes? or both?

[leejamesclark]

excellent rig and an excellent site.

curious as to what the music is. i want the album ;)

[Kuroart]

Awesome reel. Very clean and edited nicely.

[Djampa]

Man, great TD ! 5 stars for you and over !
Amazing skills, impressive reel congratulations !
I loved what you did for the girl facial controls, very good.

Best wishes,

[aleso]

simply amazing dude! great rigs!

[ewerybody]

WHOHOO! very nice! You are frontpage ChristopherC :D

reel is full of dynamic. I love that!
btw: Been to Berlin?! really nice pictures!!!

[madheavy]

Wow! That demo reel was inspiring dude! :drool: That first rig blew me away! I always wanted to know how to make bendable legs and arms...


If you ever make a tutorial html or vid, let us know.
Actually I mean, please make a tutorial html or vid!!:)

[csaez]

Awesome reel! congratulations :thumbsup:

[ChristopherC]

eddperetti: this facial rig mixes both shapes and bones.
leejamesclark: I don't know about the album, but here is the title : DJ Food - Turtle Soup (Wagon Christ mix).
ewerybody: heyy, yes I've done a Germany trip during July, including Berlin. It was soooo great ! Love the Kastanienallee and surroundings ! :)
madheavy: the rig is coming !


Thanks again for your encouragements, now I'm more motivated than ever to share with you the rig from the first part ! It will be ready for the next week, I hope.

[greyface]

Not to sound - but,what was so great about that,I have seen more complex rigging show reels on here before,don't get me wrong it's better than I can do,but I just don't see what was so good about it,maybe it's just my ignorance toward rigging.

I was expecting much more actually, and am surprised by the comments in this thread, and the plug on softimage.com. Not that this isn't good stuff, but it's all pretty basic rigging..

The animation was great, I'm specifically talking about the rigging here.

Any riggers want to chime in?

Anyway, good job :)

[surreal-reality]

I just finished a setup class at my school, and I realized setup is no simple task. and most infuriatingly if you get stuck, you're stuck. and all the finicky things in its nature made me really appreciate setup. awesome job and I will be using your reel as a goal in my future.

thanks for posting, loved it!

[sergicaballer]

Amazing stuff in your reel! I think you won't have problems to find a good rigger job! Congratulations!

[SJM]

nice reel overall ... man you have some nice rig setups ;)

[theflash]

I think it was a great real, I loved representation the most. It's very professional and engaging for anybody. However, I would say I was expecting more, mainly deformations. The setup of underlying skeleton is one of the phases of rigging, so to see everything completely in action it is important to see how the skeleton deforms the mesh. It is as challenging as setting up a skeleton.

But I should say your reel is inspiring. And the animations that you have put add quality to your reel.

[kvb]

Excellent reel. My reactions progressed like this: "Wha... but he's just in the editor, clicking on... oh... wha... hell yeah!!! NICE!!!" from that moment on my jaw was to low to the ground to make any more comments... must have been as stretchable as your IK chains;)

Really, very impressive and clever way to present your work.

kvb

[annoman]

nice show reel man! truly a front page material! congratulations!:buttrock:

[annoman]

one comment isn't enough! that was so wicked! :bowdown:
i can't imagine XSI have such power. hehe... when you do release your rigs for XSI, it might single handedly make me shift from Maya to XSI! haha! hope to see more from you mate!

Great Job! :scream::scream::bowdown:

[Gbball]

Very cool man...it makes we want to get back into animation!

[Gbball]

XSI should hire you, it'd be cool to have some customizable rigs like that coming standard with the software...oh yeah and the music is cool too!

Keep up the good work.

[SugarBunny]

I demand tutorial of some kind :D It's so awesome. Brilliant. I want to animate it!

[eek]

I'm going to give some constructive criticism here Christopher , because either people are blown away as if this was the greatest thing since sliced bread or think its a piece of crap.

Presentation

The presentation is beautiful overall, its very stylish and the transistions to the cutscenes and rigs are handled well. If anything they make the reel feel stronger than what there showing, which is great because it'll suck in viewers and recruiters.

Character Rig (bipedal)

This is a good rig overall. Stretching in rigs is something i've seen maybe in every rigging reel since 2004. Personally i'm pretty bored of it - and would much rather demonstrate that it can be implemented in a rig , than show it in a rig.

If you going to show stretching, you'll have to show full control over it, not just bend-ability but breaking of arcs, bendbone, curving etc. Its a rigging issue i still struggle with, and must be handled very carefully.

Breaking of the knee is good, but i dont like how it slightly blends back to a positions, are you breaking legs of an ik system and then blending back? What about slowing the system down,(the ik) and as you do, blend the control of the lower legs stretch in - note you'd need to store a variable 'offset'.

I dont like the up-vector, for a minute i did - but thinking about it doesnt really make sence. Why do you have both controls? Is this your form of non-flip and standard pole vector ik?

I HATE how adjusting the hips, affects the torso, neck and head this is a pain and will cause tons of counter animation to happen! - Isolation is the key (fix it!)

Face Rig & Auto rig

These are great! - my one issue would be if you can break the ik in the creation mode of the quadrapedal rig.

So there you go :) dig the music, btw.

Cheers,

Charles

[jenga]

I’m very disappointed with some ppl in here that criticize this reel as not being amazing enough for them and that they've seen better... of course you have seen better, there will always be better or should I say different, a lot of ppl here are giving an overall critique base on editing compositing rigging everything in it. I myself have seen a lot of good rig reels but they are not as well presented as this one. All I have to say is if you have seen better than good for you I’m sure the person who posted this reel here is not looking for those type of comments keep them to yourself instead give some constructive criticism... hehehe funny cuz I’m sure those who say this reel is not something to talk about or to be impressed over can't even get close to the quality of this reel itself. Please try and be polite and have some respect for others ppl hard work.


thanks

[ChristopherC]

Hey eek, thank you for taking the time to give your opinion, I really appreciate this.
Let me answer the points you have underlined.

You're right about the stretching, I should have improved its features for the demo, moreover I think the "design" of the structure is pretty much flexible and may allow such modifications without too much problems.
But I just didn't had the time for this, so I kept the rig as it was initially built for : answer to a specific production need.
Talking of the implementation, all this rig was done with automation process in mind, but I thought that dedicating one entire part of the showreel to automation was enough. Or did I misunderstood what you meant by "implementation" ?

Yes, I agree that the knee shouldn't blends back to its neutral position, but I'm not sure on how to cleanly solve this directly in the rig, taking in consideration that everything have to go back to its original position when reseting the transforms. I'll have a look at this, and invite you to do the same if I don't fix this for the release of the rig, in a few days ! :)
A solution may be to change the slider in the interface by a check box, so when turning off the breaking of the knee, a snapping function is fired. But not a so good solution since it will break the animation curves of the knee.

About the up-vector, yes I could remove it when stretching is on, but I like when rigs follows a continuity, so the animators don't get lost when using the animation controllers. It's much more simple to explain to an animator that this up-vector is OK for orienting the leg in IK mode than : "so, you see, you can use up-vector in this case, but if you enable this parameter it wouldn't work the same way, and if you touch to this other parameter... hmm, I don't remember".

Sorry, I don't really see the problem with the spine. How should the torso/neck/head behaves when moving the hip while the spine length is locked ? If you don't want them to be affected by transformations of the hip, just enable the stretch !

And for the quadruped rig, there is no IK while adjusting the model. Just a simple hierarchy of nulls. The up-vectors and chain planes that you can see are just visual helpers to tell the rigger that when the rig will be generated, the IK chains will be created within these defaults chain planes with up-vectors located at these positions.



Your blog looks interesting !

Cheers !

[eek]

Hey eek, thank you for taking the time to give your opinion, I really appreciate this.
Let me answer the points you have underlined.


About the up-vector, yes I could remove it when stretching is on, but I like when rigs follows a continuity, so the animators don't get lost when using the animation controllers. It's much more simple to explain to an animator that this up-vector is OK for orienting the leg in IK mode than : "so, you see, you can use up-vector in this case, but if you enable this parameter it wouldn't work the same way, and if you touch to this other parameter... hmm, I don't remember".

Sorry, I don't really see the problem with the spine. How should the torso/neck/head behaves when moving the hip while the spine length is locked ? If you don't want them to be affected by transformations of the hip, just enable the stretch !

Your blog looks interesting !

Cheers !

Cool man, As to the spine whatever you have you want independance of controls - this i vital. I.e you want to have independance in the hips and chest - even if the spine doesnt stretch. I.e the upper torso (chest, head) should keep its orientation locked and not appear to be 'pulled' by the hips. I.e you want to rotate the chest, head etc to say point at something - now adjusting the hips should NOT affect this direction, but rather position - its ok if adjusting the hips, pulls the chest along with the neck/heads position down but not its rotation.

You dont always want to be in stretch mode for animation, but rather use it for those punchy moments of exageration, and snappyness.

Otherwist animators will kill you :), due to having to adjust the eyeline, to counter animate this issue. Another great system Ive learn is keyable transform spaces, so you could lock the head, to the chest, torso or world rotation space.

This is great for blending between keeping the eyeline and say an arc of anticipation, or snapping back into a fast movement. It also tends to replace the look-at method of the head in old rigs. I.e you keep its orientation locked but it follows along positionally - where as a look-at method keep adjusting its direction. Problem with this is that the eyes and head would eventually snap - the eyes looking through the head and the head snaping, 180 degrees.

I understand the up-vector idea, of your rig now. - But id say in introducing a no-flip leg rig you could overcome two controls with one.

With the autoRigging tool, i meant are you able to rig a skeleton with broken IK, and not cause twisting when its skinned? Does breaking the IK angle keep the twist from not flipping still?

As to the bendy leg - pixar supported both the arcing and the curve of the chain, its a must. I've built this system many times over, and now even use my own uniform cubic curve to handle it.

cheers,

[Spin99]

Terrificness :) Amazing facial animation too.
Really looking forward to downloading your rig.
Hope you release it soon?

Beaucoup de personnes l'espèrent suis certain
C'est vraiment fantastique pour moi, cela fait 30 ans que j'aime les personnages de "Magic Roundabout" :)

Would love to know what the series is called in French.

[AVTPro]

Definitely a beacon for rigging reels. Awesome animation as well.

[ooorc46]

hi, christopher

Could you upload your reel to youtube? Since your website is one of the websites that are blocked by my country and I am very eagerly to see your reel.

[ooorc46]

Can anyone from china access the reel?

[Strang]

I was expecting much more actually, and am surprised by the comments in this thread, and the plug on softimage.com. Not that this isn't good stuff, but it's all pretty basic rigging...
...Any riggers want to chime in?
sure! its good stuff... simply executed and stable by the looks of it. its not always easy to innovate, the tools and techniques we have to work with are standard and proven and not all studios get the time or budgets to make something truly unique. with that said how do we improve? i think its about use, reuse, and performance. christopher showed a nice usable rig and his reuse with his adjustable rig builder.

now i think performance is a great thing to show, how many rigs can you have on screen at once and at what fps? sure you drop features for increased performance but if you have made your rig builder to also control what features are added to a rig, you can make characters that dont need stretchy or bendy limbs that playback much much faster than the ones that do :)

again great stuff christopher!

[cgmadvin]

Awsome work. nice

[robinmitra]

awesome stuff mate!! all da great riggers use xsi! i wonder if there r any awesome riggers using max at all :(

[ChristopherC]

One time again, thanks to all for your comments !
The rig is now ready to be released, I just need to code the associated HTML pages for my website and it will be OK ! :)


eek:
For the spine stuff, if you wan't to keep the orientation of the chest while moving the hip, you can use the orange controller surrounding the hip : it's parent of both the hip and the whole spine rig, so you have the choice of the behavior.

When the knee is locked and you move the foot outside the chain IK plane, a flip can indeed appear on extreme positions, but should not happen on practical cases since it's nonsense. Apart from this, torsion is correctly handled.

I, and certainly a lot of people, would enjoy to look at your bendy leg... would you mind sharing it with the community ?


Spin99:
its "Le manège enchanté" !
The characters also have differents name, because when the show was adapted to english in '60s, the english decided to change their name.
Dougal is Pollux, Florence is Margote, Flappy is Dylan, Ambroise is Brian, Ermintrude is Azalée, Zebedee is Zébulon, and so on.


ooorc46:
here it is, especially for you :)
The quality is really bad because YouTube recompressed my video even if I uploaded it in .flv.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjic2fmsnVU


Strang:
I do care of optimizations when doing some rigging or development. Since I created this rig during my spare time, I had time to optimize it as much as I could. But I haven't done any timing test, nor tried with multiple rigs in the scene.
If it's possible, I would be really interested in hearing your feedbacks about the rig and it's performances once it's released.

[ooorc46]

Thank you! Christopher

Awesome work!

In maya we use follicle to do curly leg or arm, but the result is not good than yours?
How do you achieve that?

[ChristopherC]

ooorc46:
you should have a look in the schematic at the structures nested under "_dirThigh" and "_dirCrus" for the legs.
The principe is really simple (but hard to explain): on the three points of the curve (hip, knee, ankle), there is a little system that aims to the next point on the curve according to the tangent direction if bending is off, so the curves looks linear. And when bending is enabled, then some rotations driven by expressions are done on the tangents handles according to the angle between the thigh and the crus.

[enjoyu2]

Can anyone from china access the reel?

用迅雷可以下，如果你下不到，我可以发给你。

[MolemanSD7]

Very nice rig sir. I like the simplicity of the bendy leg control. Nice work.

[FlySkyHigh22]

:D that was AWESOME! When is the 'Wizard of Oz' movie coming out? The like 6 seconds of it in that video made me want to see it! :P

[ChristopherC]

FlySkyHigh22:
I can't give you any date since the production didn't started yet. Hopefully it will start soon !

[FlySkyHigh22]

what?! How do you have that amazing clip?! hahahaha

Well, be sure to keep me updated! :D

Your modeling and animations are AMAZING

[ChristopherC]

Hey, just to clarify things, I haven't done any modeling nor animation on this stuff.
The sequence you see is extracted from a teaser of "The Wizard of Oz" feature film and was created by the whole team working at ActionSynthese. I've only worked on the facial rigging, and another rig that don't appear on this shot.

[FlySkyHigh22]

Ah, okay. I gotcha now :)

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