Ygark

I recently had the pleasure of rigging "Ygark", an award-winning concept by Giorgio Baroni and model by Ilya Gagarin for the "Beneath the Waves" ArtStation contest. 

This character consists of 184 joints in total with 4 Max Influences per vertex. 

The body rig came easy with this because of my modular Gossamer rigging setup. After careful joint placement, the 52 rig modules that make up this character were added to the character's rig script and the system did the rest. There wasn't much custom scripting for this character besides simple visibility switch attributes. I'm really happy with my body rigging setup. 

The facial rig is a new type of scripted setup I came up with so that I wouldn't have to deal with Set Driven Keys as much. While SDKs are flexible, they are a PAIN to create and aren't very script-friendly. Therefore, with the face rig, other than a few manual SDKs in the eyes and neck, the FACS poses are stored in wtAddMatrix nodes. Each control on the face has a parent node that connects with its corresponding wtAddMatrix node. Each FACS pose corresponds with a transformation on that node. The script is run from a file in which every left and center FACS pose is keyframed. Running the build off of that file allows me to easily tweak the resulting FACS poses and rebuild the rig. There's a bit more to it, so maybe I'll do a more in-depth write up on that soon.