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Toothless RigWhile watching the movie "How To Train Your Dragon", I found myself admiring the design of Toothless, the titular dragon of the movie. Having watched the movie many times before, I decided to try my hand at modelling the character. So as the movie played, I threw together a low poly version of him, which I ended up being very happy with (after a little tweaking).
However, being an animator, I REALLY wanted to bring this character to life. So, using my developing rigging skills, I started to make a rig. The design of the rig is modular, allowing for sections of the skeleton removed and replaced for easy debugging. This also allowed me to make each section fully scalable on its own, reducing the hassle of debugging the rig later on. The rig features IK legs, spine, wings and tail, with FK controls for the rest and driven keys for complex functions like wing folds. |
After developing the rig and painting weights (exceedingly easy, thanks to a couple of body helper joints and the low poly design), I started planning a showcase shot for the rig. Having a character that can fly and also walk, I had to come up with a good way to show both states as well as the transition. Using the opening titles of the Dragons of Berk TV show as inspiration, I decided to do scene of Toothless landing on a large outcropping of rock.
I quickly threw together a basic mossy rock and a simple lighting setup, and animated Toothless dipping into a dive, pulling up for a barrel roll, then landing and shaking himself off. I noticed during many landing sequences for Toothless that he has a very tight arc upon landing, coming from an almost vertical angle to pull up inches from the ground, decelerating almost instantly with a strong wing flare. I made sure to bring as much of that motion through in my animation, as well as some of his personality. Finally, the last step was to texture the character. Currently this is a placeholder, and quite simple at that, but it still turned out better than expected. The trick to this character was not so much the diffuse map as the specular/bump map, which replicates the shading of the original character really well. His feature scales are based entirely on rounded cobblestones, which give a great, naturally interlocking pattern. As a basic rig, this character came out much better than I had intended, and I'm proud to call this a finished project. However, I'm looking at developing this a bit more, such as adding eye and facial controls, as well as better wing skins, more minor controls on the body and wings, and possibly even developing a natural animation system similar to Dreamworks' Premo. Well, we'll see... Anyway, here's a video of the completed rig! |
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Creature design by Dreamworks Animation. Thanks to http://strecno.deviantart.com/ for his model sheets.