Kiel Figgins - Character Animator
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Demon Skin Suit - Commercial Animation / RnD
This project took place way back in 2006. It was my third commercial, and my first time in a supervisor role. Oddly enough, the animators I was supervising were all my former Leads/Sups, who were far far more talented than myself. But they were amazing, took instructions even though I was younger and junior, and we made a really cool spot and many more afterwards.
As for this particular bit, I did the character rigs, animation and the suit rig/animation. Mind you, this is 2006, so there was no maya ncloth, my auto rig didn't exist, I barely knew how to write a loop in MEL, so a lot of this was manual labour and a ton of hours. The character animation was pretty straight forward, step in, pull up, done. Once that was signed off, they created the sheep skin suit to fit the character model. I rigged over 200 floating single controls/joints in a grid pattern across the mesh. Then I made a locator constrained to the corresponding body joint for each floating control, with a parent constraint to that locator and the rigs world control, as well as a channel to blend the constraint to be global or ride with the body. The finger/gloves/ears were fk chains, no rigs.
For the animation, I flattened all the floating joints down to the ground in a pile. Once he steps in, I started manually moving each floating control to the corresponding attach position, once it was close, I'd animate the constraint on. Once the general timing was done, I went back in and added some sag offset animation and helped ease the blend points.
Looking back now, it seems so straight forward. Plus with the tools available now, simming would really help how the suit rested on the body. But at the time, it was a crowning achievement for me to figure out a workable solution, with in the timeline and budget using only vanilla maya and no tools. Plus I still really like how the finger gloves flop around, feels empty and really hit the look I was going for.