Chilita
Chilita is a character designed forthe Casa Alvarez Chile website and ad campaign. After working on labels for packaging I was asked to convert one of the 2d characters from the label into an animatable, 3d version that could dance and look sexy. Creating a chili pepper that was "sexy" was no easy task for me. Furthermore, without legs dancing doesn't really seem like dancing. I ultimately decided to focus on the hips and shoulders above all else. The resulting rig allows full twisting and movement without collapsing the mesh. The breasts and hair use a dynamic rig system and are fully customizable. The dress, as well, is dynamic cloth which ultimately, I hope, will result in some very fluid and captivating movement when her hips start swinging.
Martin in his Cheetah Suit
A while back a very special and talented artist mentioned she was working on some 3d models for print for Wild Kratts television show. I offered to help with some of the modeling and texturing using zBrush and Maya. In the end I decided to use the model I had created for some rigging and animation practice. I had some trouble creating flexibility in the chest armor section, especially the shoulders, while maintaining the rigidity so resemble hard armor.
The face was not modeled and therefore not rigged for animation. The body, feet, hands and tail have full functionality.
My very first experiment in rigging. This dolphin was one of two created for a class project. My idea was to have a decent amount of control over the shape of the body, but to create an auto-swim function in the rig that allowed me to adjust the swim speed and strength but not have to worry about animation each stroke. The final rig provides twist controls, fin, mouth and eyelid controls, and auto-swim with a control to adjust the flexibility of the tail fins.