Rhino Rig Part 2

First of all, here's a couple screenshots of the wireframe:

It's not a bad model at all by any means. It's pretty detailed, but I do worry that it may be too much detail, or at least too dense in certain areas that may not need to be that dense. Like I noted in the other post, the feet and the folds in the skin do worry me. I'd love any comments from other riggers on what they feel about this model, and I can take more screenshots as needed.

I'm not very used to some of the edge loops like behind the knee and on areas of the back where it meets the folds. This could play to my advantage in terms of deformation, or it may not. I have to be careful about those areas to make sure they deform right.

The first thing I did after looking over the model was to go online and look up some Rhino reference videos. I need to check out how much motion and what kinds of deformations I would need to have on the rig. I should note that the goal is for a realistic rig, which as you can see from the render of the other post, too much stretch is going to stand out like a sore thumb with how this character is textured. It's always important to have live reference before even starting to rig so you get an idea of what you need to match up to.

I have to say I was pretty surprised how much more flexible the skin looks on the real rhino than what some of us may have been led to believe. It's definitely thick and tough, but yet it seems more malleable than not. Also, they don't act stiff when they are active. It will be a fun challenge to see if I can give the character just the right amount of flexibility and keep it looking realistic. I definitely think I will have to use a muscle system extensively to get not only the skin to look right, but the jiggle and secondary movements like the stomach and neck areas.

Research Research Research. That's all I have to say before I even place my first joint.

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.