In all the time that I have been learning Animation, I always wanted to make a rig based on my own design and animate it. The pure technicality of modelling and rigging always caused me to hold off on that. Especially when using Maya. Though when I showed people my show-reel, I always got the question, if I also made the models. It was kind of hard to explain the compartmentalization of an Animation production to non-professionals.
Since I have begun to learn how to handle Blender, I found the workflow with it to be quite natural and intuitive. Recently I started to take a shot at making my own rigs by setting the expectations really low as not to disappoint myself. I wanted to make a very basic rig within a very short time frame.
Modelling
After watching the Wonder Woman movie I started doing some sketches of her. Ultimately I picked a doodle of her as a basis for my first rig. I knew from the beginning that I didn't want a rig with too much detail, so I opted for the low-poly look.
Rigging
With the help of the usual tutorial, I made my first advances into the field of rigging. I have to mention Darren Lile here, who not only offers a series of great tutorials for free on Youtube, but who also works as a teacher for Lynda.com. Even though Blender offers some great add-ons like BlenRig which basically delivers you an easy to customize professional rig, I wanted to do mine from the ground up.
Not only did I not need some of the advanced functions like facial rigging or deformations by lattices, but in the future I want to be able to quickly rig my own simple characters if need be. So after a couple of hours I came up with this.
And it works! Ok, the deformations need a lot of work and the shoulders seriously need some re-rigging I guess, but the results are not completely off (as I feared). It has been a great learning experience!
You can find Darren Lile's great free tutorials here. He also has some tutorials on modelling and texturing and so forth, so if you want to make your own basic character as well, check them out.
Take a look at BlenRig if you really want to level up your rigs.
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