To start of the rigging section of the animated short I wanted to collect first had references of the balloons and the strings. This task proved to be quite challenging as their was little no wind that day and basically the rest of that week, so I devised a new set up indoors using a clothe’s rack and a couple hairdressers set to cold. This was really fun to do as it was not easy to accomplish, I also wanted to capture the motion in slo-mo to really capture the movement of the balloons working with the strings in harass conditions. (Quality of video is slow, also ignore the sounds of hair dryers).
Insert video one-
Insert Video two-
(So the slo-mo didn’t upload to Youtube properly but you get what I was trying to do)
Then I decided to try popping the balloons to get the slow mo effect of the rubber separating for the final scenes of our animated short, hopefully they will upload to Youtube properly so the effect is there.
After this I began working on the rig for the strings for the animation with the help of the video below I was able to create the rig shown within the video. This video took me a couple of hours to complete where as the video consisted of 13 minutes.
Below is that video-
Screenshot of rig I completed- (Hopefully it functions properly)-
So then below is the video i used to add the mesh-
Mesh Added quick Play blast-
Shortly after this I showed Mateja and asked her on her opinion of the rig she quickly pointed out to me that we should try and make the rope twist to make it light so it fully represents the strings within the Animated Short, and I could completely agree.
After many hours of trying to work out why the rope wouldn’t twist I admitted defeat and asked Alec if he could point me in the right direction, to my surprise it was the simplist change to make which I was so happy about. What needed fixed was the amount of subdivisions going up the rope which was an easy fix.
However as this rope rig was now appropriate to the task we were unable to attach it to the balloon appropriately. What happen was that the balloon was being influenced by the rope and it would distort the balloon which was then unsuitable. So therefore we were unable to use my rig but I wanted to include it to show my development.
Below is a playblast of the fixed String-
Reflection-
Looking back on this section of the project I was really nervous on starting to rig objects as I simply didn’t think I could but now looking back through my work it wasn’t that difficult to create the joint chain and controllers that I had simply built up the anxiety of starting to rig but it was actually quite enjoyable after you got the hang of what you were trying to achieve. Unfortunately this rig did not make it into the final short but I still wanted to write a post on it as I had worked hard in creating the rig for the short.
Shannon Murray - University of Ulster Animation 