Leandro “Cesio” Inocencio and I were trying to figure out a way to set up a rig in a similar fashion than the fantastic rig from Victor Vinyals demo reel, with smooth IK/FK blending, autosnapping and UI simpleness as Pepeland’s Red Nelb.

Lots of features missing in the Blender API as well as bugs in Blender, were stopping us to get what we wanted. Fortunately, Campbell Barton and Joshua Leung were there to help coding the needed API commands and fixing the annoying bugs and we succeed at getting the smooth IK/FK blending which was the most difficult part (actually it was Joshua who provided us a sample code that put us on the right track).I finally applied all these tests and ideas into one single rig for my Maloyó Project.

You can see the rig demo here -> www.malefico3d.org/movies/maloyo_rig.avi and in YouTube.

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In the “Pocoyó” CG series, even when everything is 3D the character’s eyes are 2D. Looking for a technque that allowed me to imitate this in a way that was also easy to animate I tried this method I’d like to share with you all. (more…)

For Maloyó, I knew from the beginning I was going to need facial animation and my old character mesh had a number of problems: bad topology, very low poly mesh, no mouth interior, etc etc. It was OK for some stills or non-facial animation but that was all. So I started remodelling arms, hands, and correcting topology as to have nicer deformations.

Major work was to remodel the whole face. Here I started from scratch (actually from a Cube ) and in the meantime I re-studied the old edge-looping theory.

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After animating 3 different walkcycles for my character I tried to combine everything in Blender’s NLA editor. When doing so, it was apparent that many changes had to be done…

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