Rigging Problems

There were two problems that I faced in the practical aspect of this project that I wanted to document in depth about. these problems were problems with rigging in some way shape or form in both the CGI and the stop-motion animations.

The first problem was with the stop-motion animation, to achieve a convincing hop of the sheep I would need to use a rig, one that would keep the sheep airborne between taking frames that would be removed in post production, one issue with stop-motion that every animator experiences with stop-motion, this is due to the fact that a character can not simply float without the support of a rig, for example in one scene in the boxtrolls when the characters are falling:

as you can see this is crucial to the performance otherwise the characters would only be able to perform with constant contact with the floor, but I encountered a big problem with the rig I had. There was a few parts missing from the rig so I couldn't tighten the joints of it, this meant the whole rig was very loose which made it impossible to support a character which meant I had to go without which made my animation look very shoddy and not how I wanted the sheep to perform, that is why I chose to do another version of the stop-motion animation in the form of legless sheep that would have no other option than to roll across the set, this turned out to look even worse as they started to lose all resemblance to sheep.

The second problem I encountered was with the CGI model of the sheep, this was due to the lack of knowledge I had on creating rigs in Maya so when I tried, I only rigged the sheeps legs which turned out to be a bad idea as it was manipulating the whole mesh:

As you can see the model is very disfigured, so I went down the path of on-line tutoring in the form of Digital Tutors, I watched a very informative rigging tutorial where I was able to successfully rig my sheep to a better standard of rigging:

This reduced the deformation caused by an un-educated rig, this relates to the issues of CGI that I have been researching, how the CGI animation industry has a pipeline of people all responsible for smaller aspects of the animation such as rigging or modelling alone where they would have had to have lots of experience in the field in order to get there.

It was a shame I had to resort to no rig for the stop-motion because this would have really backed up my research in terms of dream-like animations better suiting stop-motion animation as the sheep would look very much like a physical object but when it suddenly appears to jump or hop then it suddenly becomes more believable as an animation.

But the new rig worked a lot better than the old one and it was all done inside Maya, no need to take everything apart like one would have to do to correct a stop-motion armature, which is one of the many tangible downfalls that one would face in stop-motion animation as opposed to CGI.