While working for the Brigham Young University (BYU) Student Film Project The Witch's Cat, I took part into rigging a frog character that appears in the latter half of the film, as well as worked on a couple of the character rigs for Previs. Although this frog was meant to move in an irregular manner, the complete rig is made out of many components that could be proceduralized, and so I designed a set of rigging tools that could help me and other future riggers at BYU built rigs faster.

Bend-bow Creator

Bend-bows are used in rigging to bend extremities of characters in a cartoon-y manner. They are useful in conveying weight and fluidity to the limbs, and they can be extremely laborious to make. After getting tired of doing the same procedure for two arms, I decided to make a tool that will take any joint chain and create bend-bows procedurally. The code to this tool runs on the Maya python API and can be found here.

Joint Ribbon Generator

After making the bend-bow creator, I thought: Why stop there? I wanted to figure out how much of this rigging process I could proceduralize. And so I created a joint ribbon generator tool that will create a ribbon rig given the poly-edges that make up a character's mouth. The script for this tool can be found here.

Bezier Joint Guide

This yet another tool that I created with the purpose of creating joints guided by the movement of a Bezier curve based on selected poly-edges. I mainly used this for the eyes of characters. The script for this tool can be found here.