Rigs

Nico Facial Rig

This is a joint based facial rig. Nico has set driven keys to drive the facial movements. 

Animatronic Eye Rig

I did this as part of an exercise to do animatronic parts as a rig. I did eyes with plates that would move as if in a robot.

Final of the animatronic jaw movement with skinned face

This includes a breakdown of the solider saying the word maggots. This shows the talking model, the robotic breakdown underneath, and the joints underneath that. At the end you see the moving parts of all the mechanics once again to show how it all came together. 

Upper and Lower Middle Lever Joint Breakdown

This is the final breakdown of the jaw animatronic rig. To do the upper and lower lip I did a basic lever kind of mechanic. It give an easy way to pull the lip up and down to give it a nice lip syncing 

ability.

Side Lips Breakdown

This shows how the I did the lips on the side. There is a RP ikhandle and a single ikhandle on top of it. This give it the mechanical ability needed for an animatronic but also the animator freedom of accurate lip syncing. 

The Corner Lip Breakdown

In this video I give you a close up look on how I did the corner lip mechanics. It was made using the same method as the jaw movement. This method gives the user the ability to move the corner lips not only up and down, but also push and pull it forwards and backwards.

Jaw Plate Movement Up and Down

In this video I show how the jaw joint mechanic is used in action to make the jaw plate and lower teeth move. The robotic joints would move the plate up and down as shown.

Connecting Joint Chains IK together

This video shows how I created the joints for the jaw movement. It was tricky to get them to work together seamlessly but by parenting the ikhandles to the parent joint it worked. 

Inspiration for Animatronic rig

For my tech art final for my first semester, we were asked to do a personal project. After going to one of the Disney theme parks I was inspired to try and build an animatronic rig. I wanted to build the infrastructure of the robot, and then after skinning it use that to "push" the skin of the face. 

After doing some research I found this animatronic created by Disney for one of the Avatar rides. 

The first challenge I wanted to tackle was creating the jaw movement. I wanted to create these two mechanical joints that not only work together, but also only have one degree of freedom.

Low Poly Guard Rig 

Range of Motion Test