Rhino Rig Part 1

For some time now I've known I needed a rather flashy character to show off my rigging skills on my demo reel since it's a lot easier to show off a rig on a nice character than it is on a bunch of parts, tests, or low poly characters. This Rhino is probably going to be that character. Or at the very least, the first one.

The model itself I was told was a stock model from Modo that was transferred over into Maya. The video posted here and all the texture and lighting work is by David McMahon. He's the one that proposed the idea of me rigging this with the potential for it to be animated in time for the AAU Spring Show this year. This means I probably will need to find the time to learn what I need to learn and rig this within a couple months if not less. Should be completely doable, long as nothing crazy is in my way.

The model itself is over 18k Verts and while it's not that high, it's where the dense areas concern me. Under and around the folds and the feet have what I normally would consider overly dense topography but it hopefully wouldn't be a problem. Since this model is already textured and that process took quite a bit of time, having anything that would chance the UVs would be a bad idea at this point so it's either a "Yes, I can rig this" or "No, I can't" situation and I said yes I can. Ideally would have had some cleanup but I don't always get that luxury. Going to be using Maya Muscle heavily on this character and that's the area I need to learn the most since I never had a reason to dive into that part of rigging yet.

Here's the video of the rendered turnaround. If I had this in a wireframe version I would have used that instead to post.

Here I go. I'm going to do my best to document my process (first time) as I go rig this Rhino, or at the very least, remember to document at all, for I'm pretty new at this blog stuff.