1. Sam – Modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering – Zbrush, Maya, Marvelous Designer, Xgen, Substance Painter, Arnold
A demonstration of modeling, texturing, and rendering a highly detailed character from a heavily stylized concept art source.
Minor adjustments made to maintain an appealing form in three dimensions.
Procedural hair system with expression-based Xgen guide curves and groomable splines.
Original concept art by Nicholas Kole.
2. Bigshot – Modeling, retopologizing, texturing, rigging, lighting, rendering – Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter, MentalRay
A character bust and facial rigging setup designed for ease of use for initial posing, along with layers of unlocked fine controls for complex shaping.
3. Frog – Modeling, texturing, rigging – Maya, Substance Painter
An extremely comprehensive ribbon rig which allows unparalleled control over each joint length, allowing artists to easily and intuitively adjust and animate all aspects of a control’s behavior, including position, influence area, interpolation, squash/stretch, and twist, while also granting the artist a wealth of other options including sine wave manipulation, random noise, and joint distribution. Designed for use in any and every part of a character rig, including spine, lips, arms, legs, etc. Created entirely with native Maya nodes, and options are easy to access and ubiquitous throughout the rig.
4. Shelf-Building Rig – Rigging, scripting, modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering – Maya, MASH, MEL, Arnold
An outside-the-box use of the procedural animation toolset in Maya to create a modeling asset.
5. Kindred Main Character – Modeling, rigging, scripting – Maya, MEL
A demo of a model and facial rig utilizing a system of mesh controls, which allow animators to deform characters with very little visual clutter, and to select controls without requiring pixel-perfect accuracy. The script can be applied to any finished rig and is a non-destructive system, allowing animators to switch back to the original curve controls if desired. Computationally fast – no wrap deformers.
6. Male Torso – Retopologizing, texturing, rigging – Maya, Substance Painter
A rig demonstrating a physically realistic style, using sculpted pose-space deformers.
Original high-poly base mesh modeled by Paul Chen.
7. FK Ribbon Rig – Rigging – Maya
A similar rig to the one found on the frog demo, this time using FK rotation controls. Position and influence area attributes are adjustable, as well as rotation multiplier values for areas outside the area of influence, allowing for interesting and useful controls.
8. Ezbake Dynamics Script – Scripting, dynamics, animation – Maya, MEL
Short animation demonstrating a script for using nParticle dynamics to add overlapping motion and physical realism to any animated control with translate attributes. Allows users to access dynamic attributes before baking, as well as keying the influence of the dynamics in relation to the original animation. All animation curves affected are saved and can be restored at any time.
9. Bendy Arm Autorig Script – Scripting, rigging – Maya, MEL
A script that creates a feature-rich 3-joint FK/IK system, utilizing a tangent-based bend system, allowing easy and fun character animation with intuitive controls. Features include an FK/IK switch accessible from all controls, automatic twist distribution up to 360 degrees, automatic squash and stretch adjustable on a per-joint level, a no-flip pole vector control, elbow pinning, adjustable and animatable pivots on all controls, and FK translation.
