Michael LaniganTechnical Artist • 3D Generalist • Motion Designer
Henry the Egg
Maya, mGear, Bifrost, Houdini
Henry the Egg is an experimental character rig created for an indie game I'm developing with the working title "Sunnyside". Henry is a shapeshifting sunnyside-up egg that uses Maya's Bifrost to blend multiple meshes together. mGear is the rigging framework used, scripting in pyMEL to procedurally and iteratively update the rig.
The rig consists of 5 circular "arm" meshes that are controlled with latice deformers skinned to joints to stretch out the arms of the character. These 5 meshes (plus a morphing blendshape mesh) are all combined together in Bifrost as parellel non-additive blendshapes.
Eyes are controlled with tapered blendshapes attached to a control rig. Also has additional controls for changing the shape and form of the eyes and brows. The rig also features chain-spring joints to more easily apply physics-based animation to the arms and head.
Henry can morph into a wide variety of shapes, either through blendhapes or stretching and bending the character's control rig. The character can then be exported into Unity via Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) to preserve the animation in a realtime game engine.