Jed/Ed

Easily my most complex undertaking to date, this colourful and wacky duo caused me no end of grief! The primary challenge I faced with Ed and Jed was learning to make IK setups fully stretchable. The director needed to use them for some very dynamic pieces of animation- In particular with the dancing hospital janitor, Jed. I learnt a lot more about MEL, expressions, and utility nodes through doing this, and ultimately succeeded in making the legs, arms, spine, and head (which also need an IK spline handle setup) fully stretchable. The second biggest challenge of these rigs was getting the stretching to work with all the other controls, although through trial and error I eventually succeeded in this and at the same time made it was possible to bend the limbs after they were stretched as well.

Aside from this, these characters (mainly Jed) tested me on many other little things as well: Jed’s oddly shaped feet meant I had to re-think the normal reverse foot setup; the afro needed to be able to do secondary animation, but not with the limited Jiggle deformer; proper eyelid/eyeball setups; multiple squash and stretch deformers; and more that all needed to work with each other. I had to really push my problem solving and experimenting skills to the max to get everything working, and overall these guys may have had me on edge for a while, but I came out of it a better person!