I worked on many rigs for UTDallas' Animation Lab project, Sunny. I primarily focused on the main character, Sunny, but I also rigged many background characters and provided support and fixes to the animators when rigs broke or they wanted new features. In the second semester I took on a co-lead position.

Sunny Website

This was for Rigging Dojo's Face Rigging 101 course. I learned a lot and have already used these skills on other face rigs.

I wrote Python code to generate a gear rig for any number of gears. I modeled two sizes of gears to show off the rig, one with 10 cogs and one with 20 cogs, but the rig can be configured to work with any number of cogs.

This was a summer project I had been thinking about for a while but didn't have time to work on during the regular school year. I learned a lot about Maya's Python library and relearned some Python skills. I also learned how to use GitHub and got some bonus practice using Substance Designer.

GitHub

This assignment was from Rigging 1 at UTDallas and was to fully rig a character model. The character model was provided by professor.

This was my final project in my Advanced Skills class at Collin. I got to choose the project and picked this one because I wanted to learn how to rig a face. My professor provided a control system that would drive the blendshapes, but I had to interpret what the various blendshape names meant and were supposed to look like.

I did not have a lot of experience in blendshapes when I started this project. I knew how to do it technically, but not the best shapes to make and this project was good practice in learning those skills. I sculpted the entire model and accessories and I re-topologized everything. I then sculpted blendshapes needed to connect to the interface. I had a lot of fun on this project and learned a lot.

This was a project in my Advanced Skills class at Collin. I chose this project because I wanted to see if I could rig an octopus tentacle using Inverse Kinematics (IK).

To model the tentacle I made 3 sections: top, middle, and bottom. I then wrote a Python script to stack the different pieces. Then I cleaned up the model manually.

So far I have made 2 versions of this rig. This first version works similar to bezier curves in Photoshop or Illustrator. However, once it was animated, the controls looked chaotic. The second version, not shown, has less controls and utilizes scale to adjust the sharpness of a curve.

import maya.cmds as m

''' --- change these values --- '''
totalTentacleHeight = 40 #will not go below 4 units in length even if set lower
'''-----------------------------'''

n = 2
midSections = totalTentacleHeight - 4

m.duplicate('tentaclePart_Base')

for x in range(midSections):
    tempName = m.duplicate("tentaclePart_Mid", rc = True)
    print(tempName)
    m.move(0, n, 0, tempName, r = True, os = True, wd = True,)
    n = n + 1

print(n)
tempName = m.duplicate('tentaclePart_Tip')
m.move(0, n, 0, tempName, r = True, os = True, wd = True,)

The assignment was to create a full character rig with a prop. I designed, modelled, rigged, textured, and animated this character and his prop myself. This was my first time rigging a bow and I had to learn how to set up space switching to hold and let go of the bow and arrow.

This was part of a group game project. I rigged 5 characters that were modeled by one of the other students on the project. The main character had a bag that I rigged with an IK solution so it can move independently.

Since all the characters were very similar I didn't need to make a new skeleton for each character. However, I did need to resize the skeleton for some of the characters. I wrote a script to recreate all the constraints once I repositioned the joints and controls.