Jack and his Brother - CelAction Rigging

I learned a lot about rigging during this project. The first thing we noticed is that there was an issue with working with black outlines on the characters; they would not allow for a smooth overlapping between the different shapes of the body.

I was sure that there was a solution to our problem because I know the Mr Bean animated series is done in CelAction and they have black outlines but at this point it was about finding out if the solution would be more complicated than our timeframe would allow. Our first step was to contact Jess Davies who told us she was familiar with the problem and she agreed to talk to us for a few minutes after her lecture with the third years.

The solution was to have the black outlines as a separate layer, which is big black patch and to use masks to get rid of some of the lines. This didn’t seem too complicated and considering we would need to be able to deal with black outline in CelAction for our Widecombe fair project, we decided to give this method a try.

I worked on rigging Wilson and Tim worked on the rig for Mei. This is the final version of Wilson’s winter rig:

 

The next step was for me to figure out the hierarchy within CelAction which took a lot of trial and error but I eventually got there and was able to help Tim with his Mei rig.

Then I had to learn about display orders, which Jess had explained to us but it still took a bit of fiddling and trial and error to finally get the rig to look right. There aren't many online resources or tutorials for CelAction so I had find out most of it by myself.

Finally, I experimented with masks:

   

I also compiled everything I found into one document that I shared with the rest of our course as a guide for the Widecombe fair project, which we are all doing together. I also did a short lecture for everyone where I showed what I learned and how we can apply it to our Widecombe fair rigs.

Overall I really enjoyed working on this project. It taught me a lot about working in a team and using CelAction. I definitely thought that Ra’ees and Tim were great team-mates and we communicated well throughout the production. 
I feel I particularly thrived on using CelAction and learning about all the ins and outs of rigging a character in it, especially because my team was very supportive. We were quick to communicate with each other as soon as we found out something new, which made the animation process feel very dynamic. Because we worked so hard on getting the rigs right and because Tim and I agreed on having the same naming conventions, the animation process went quite smoothly and it was easy to swap scenes form one computer to the other, because all of our files where on the google drive and always up-to-date. 

I am quite pleased with the result and even though I can see where we made mistakes, I can say where and how exactly they happened so that I can quite confidently that that when Tim, Ra’ees and I work together next time, we will be able to produce better results. From this project we have decided that we enjoy working together and would like to do so again.

Most of the shots I did are on my showreel here and the final animation should be on Youtube soon.