How to rig this creature?

[Darksuit]

Looking at this from a Technical point of view.

This is all from the point of view that I have no idea what you are using the mesh for, ie, is it for a short animation, Movie, still shot, game. Each one of these will more than likely take a different type of rig and limit or change how you might accomplish what you are doing.

First thing I would wind up doing is recutting the mesh to fix edge loops. The Shoulders will present a problem as well as parts of the face. The shoulder loop should follow arond the shoulder and the scapula and pectoral. You may want to take a look at the Bay Raitt and Greg Minter Siggraph 2000 paper. It has some good examples of Facial edgeloops.

I would more than likely convert to Polys. But thats just me.

Next is understanding how the character moves. And by that I mean, when the animator wants to move the character or rotate the character where is the root joint places and how does it effect the associated parts. The root might be the pelvis (which is where my first pass might start) then play around with the tail. I might even run some small scale tests using a hair folicle to dynamically control the lower body. Or I might stick with FK. Depends on how much control I want to have.

As stated above the intended use is going to drive the type of rig that I use more than anything else.

[Mujushin]

ok. First things first, The model is for a short animation (2 mins) I'm aware the topology needs lots of fixing, the model was built in a matter of hours so that I have something to show my university when I try to explain the plot of this animation.

The placement of the root is what my biggest problem with this character is, I want it to be able to move the upper section back and forth whilst the tail and contact part of the lower body stay in position, I had thought about keeping the top and bottom sections seperate, but feel this would make things difficult. Would it really be worth my time attempting to get my head around using the hair system for dynamic control or would it be more benneficial to use a bone structure for the top half and a lattice for the bottom? Or again something I've not thought of.

The rig I create for this character needs to intergrate both a snake like movement and a biped like movement. His arms are oversized so he will more than likely use them to claw through the air as he moves forward. His top half will lurch forward as he comes out of the slither, the top half needs to swerve side to side as he tries to pull his weight back towards the COG after pushing forward. To create this kind of motion he will need quite a few control points from the bottom of chest to the tip of the tail. Unfortunatly it's difficult to explain exactly how he is, without directly showing you.

Hope that makes it easier to see what I'm trying to do

[Darksuit]

If you take a look at the movement of Medusa from the original "Clash of the Titans" This I believe describes the sort of movement that you are looking for.

THe basic premise that you have from the pelvis up built the same way as a standard Human, using the pelvis as the root joint and then think of the lower body as a single leg, or tail. You would move the creature foward by controlling the root and then animate the tail to give it the impression that the tail is moving it forward.

[Mujushin]

spot on with the medussa thing. I've been trying to think of something that had that kind of movement in it. I've now got a good idea of how i'm going to lay this out, I'll have to post something further on here once I've put it togethor. Thanks so much for your help

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