Rigging Melvin

We have named the cat Melvin and I have just finished rigging him.

It taught me some new techniques especially about using spline IK handles rather then normal IK handles.

One valuable lesson I did learn whilst rigging was to always freeze transformations as you go. I had a lot of trouble after I had finished the rig as I hadn't frozen any transformations. This meant I could not reset the position of my character properly. In the end, it was a case of carefully undoing parts of my work, freezing transformations and re-doing them again.

I think the rig can be improved and if I were to do this again, I would probably not use circles for every single handle as when you use them, especially for the neck, they can easily get lost within the body. When I was rigging the rat in the last project, I coloured the handles depending on which side of the body they were for. I did not do this with this rig but I would next time only for the fact that the pole vectors get lost amongst each other when moving the cat around and when legs start to cross over each other it can get confusing.

I have found it hard to paint weights which I did not do for my previous rigs but this cat had quite a lot of vertices and I would find that when I moved a handle one way (usually the chest), if I moved it the other way, it would distort and crease. The painting weights on this cat are a constant work in progress as the more I move the cat around and push poses, I find a weight that needs addressing so this will probably continue to happen and continue to be addressed.

This rig needed more movement than previous rigs so I got to use set driven keys to bend and stretch the toes and blend shapes so that the cat can shut it's eyes. The ears had to have movement as well which could have been done using blend shapes (that method was used with the previous cat rig) but it was not very successful so I used joints this time to give them more freedom. That meant they can go in any direction and fold over or go to the side without having to re-model and adjust cat models to create blend shapes.

Below is a video of the melvin cat rig: