RACING!!!!

This is a short animation I did with Lisa Hochstenbach and Martijn van Gurp for the dutch national television show `het Klokhuis`. We were asked to come up with a character and make a short sketch to fit a given theme: city cleaning. We all did our part in this animation, but I was solely responsible for all the CG-elements and compositing.

Tile

A short animation of a hanging tile I did for Nicole (link). I think it turned out pretty close to photo-realistic.

48hr film festival

I was asked to design a logo for a team participating on the 48hr film competition. Above is the result of this. I also did the end credits for the film. Below you see a still of what I came up with. Unfortunately this version wasn`t used in the end, but I did like how it turned out.

Backbones

I`ve been doing some research on spines. What would be a good spine to animate with? I learned most through a discussion on the CGTalk forums on a new spine technique, named the "Awesome spine". Main benefit of a IK-spine stup would be the independant hip and chest controll. Most IK-setups can do this and focus seems to have shifted to making such spines twist way beyond physical breaking point. The "Awesome spine" actually does do a good job on that, but it lacks solidity. As you independantly move the hips and chest, the length of the spine changes and is always stretchy. The parts would seem to be unconnected and drift in an animation. For this reason most animators still prefer a FK setup instead. With my "simple spine" setup I hoped to include all the benefits of a IK setup, while keeping the spine solid. For twisting I used a similar trick to the "Awesome spine" and upon further investigating I found more similarities. However, in the "simple spine" the spine retains its length and a nice curve, unless you increase the "max stretch"-attribute.
I haven`t gotten all the kinks out of it yet, but above video should give a impression about where I`m heading with this.

It moves!!

After a lot of messing around I finally fixed a solid FK<>IK switching system. It looks a lot easier than it is. Either that, or I have been doing something very wrong. The example in the video shows how it works on a finger like limb. But now that I`ve solved all the problems it can be easily adjusted to fit toes, arms and legs aswell.
It features FK<>IK blending and switching, a `finger curl`-attribute and a stretch limiter. With this attribute you can set the maximum scale you want the limb to have. Setting a small value, like 1.05, could be usefull for sticking the feet a bit more solid to the floor in a extended position of the legs.

Laying out the Topo

A WIP vid of the rigging scripts. It allows the user to connect all kinds of limbs together. This way you wont be stuck with a standard biped topology. The scripts first generate locators which indicate the joints. They can be moved around and rotated untill it fits the character.
The limbs can be further customized by `breaking` the joints (for smoother bending) or indicating that its supposed to be a stretchy limb (visually, not through a list of features you want on the final rig). The extent of the break can be adjusted by a slider. The the rig can then be assembled by just hitting a single button.
I`m currently at the stage of checking the joint orientations. Just before the final rig is assembled, the user can check all the joint orientations and adjust where needed.