Watch Chris McFall’s BCon Talk on Rigging a Jellyfish

Chris McFall Gives Some Insights on Rigging a Jellyfish With Blender

United Filmdom’s Chris McFall gave a talk at the 2017 Blender Conference on the challenges and solutions on rigging for formlessness… like a how to rig a jellyfish. “Originally Created for a new jellyfish exhibit in a popular tourist attraction on Londons Southbank, this job is an excellent example of rigging an amorphous or formless object,” McFall says.

McFall covers some tips as to how to economically rig an object using Mesh Def and Screw Modifiers. He also looks at an approach to rig and how to manually animate hundreds of tendrils of the jellyfish.  This would be in opposition to using dynamic simulations. “The final piece was created in Blender, Substance Painter, and Adobe After Effects, and put together over a month in the winter of 2016,” McFall notes.

As an addendum, Chris writes: “I was later informed by Daniel Martinez Lara, That bendy bones deformations can Be cleaned up using a corrective smooth modifier, and whilst this works to some extent, A cleaner result can be obtained by  fixing hooked curves to bendy bones and deforming that way.”