Dancer by the Sea is a story of loss, love, and acceptance, in which a former dancer, Grace, grieves over the loss of her partner. One evening she finds and abandoned baby otter and takes him in, taking care of him and raising him as if he were her own. However, the otter grows quickly and soon her home becomes a dangerous place for him. She has to learn to let him go, and find happiness, just as she did when she found the otter after her husband's passing.

The otters in this film were an interesting challenge. They had to be able to move on all fours like a quadruped, but also have the ability to move onto their hind legs and move like a biped, much like a real otter does. They had to be flexible, since an otter's movement is fluid, so we had to find a way to give an appropriate amount of controls for the animators to use. We also had the challenge of building a rigging template that would work across three different otters of three different sizes, since the character ages throughout the film, starting from a baby, to an adolescent, to an adult otter.

Working alongside another rigger on the team, we started off by doing some research at a local aquarium, to get a better understanding of how otters not only move, but also what they look like in their resting stage, whether sleeping, or standing on their hind legs. We also found useful materials online, including the skeleton of an otter. I worked to build the underlying skeleton, the spine, and the face rig while my partner worked on adapting our quadruped leg component to function even if the otter is on two feet. Part of the challenge of building the skeleton and then figuring out which spine component would work best (we ran many tests and decided on something based off of the ribbon spine) was also trying to figure out how many joints would be needed. Too many made it hard for the animator to use, but too few didn't give the otter enough flexibility. We worked closely with the animators, leading to many iterations that finally led to a rig with the perfect balance.

Grace is the charactr that experiences loss in Dancer by the Sea. Though she is a humanoid character, there were still some challenges that we faced with her when creating the film. The first big challenge we encountered was with her outfits. Grace was one of the first characters where we had multiple outfit changes throughout the film. I had to find a way that was easy for the animators to switch in between outfits. We had considered using different models that we could swap between, but this would have been more cumbersome for layout with how far into the film we were at the time. I instead created some attribute switches that could be toggled on and off to show certain jackets or certain shoes.

Another challenge with Grace's attire was how it fit her. In past films, all of our characters had form fitting clothes and there was a reason for that. Since the production took place over a six month period, developing a pipeline for cloth simulation would take longer than that, and the time to render as well as re-run these simulations would take a lot of resources that we didn't have. We generally only have about twenty students, most of whom have only started to use Maya, so they were learning while they were working. Instead we decided to rig the clothes so that the animators could control it manually. This of course meant that the animators had to make it look believable with a limited number of controls. Though the end result does look nice in most shots of the jackets and the sweater (particularly the jacket in the dancing shot), if given the time I would have liked to have found a better solution, maybe using clusters along with a wire or lattices instead of just joints and corrective blendshapes, maybe even find a way to combine these methods.

The face rig also posed some challenges due to the structure of Grace's face. She has a very narrow chin so a broad smile is difficult for her to achieve. We had to combine the use of joints with blendhshapes so that the students could produce a believable smile in some of the shots.