I was brought onto Potionomics to create a face rig for the character Quinn. Making a face rig for Quinn was the first time that I was exposed to a game engine, in this case the Unreal engine. I had never worked with game engine from a rigging standpoint before. The most I had done was some coding in Unity. Thus this presented me with some challenges that I had to overcome. The rigs I created in the past relied a lot of deformers and tools that were central to Maya. These same tools and connections did not exist onces the rigs were exported for an engine. So I had to come up with some creative ways to get the same functionality, without using the exact same setup. Working with the head animator on the project who explained to me the ins and outs of rigging in a game engine, I was able to create a fully functioning face rig.

One of the challenges for this rig was getting the cartoony eye set up to work. This works by using a series of curves that drive a series of joints to get those nice arcs for the eye. The only problem is that the initial set up uses wire deformers, which couldn't be ported over to the game. So instead I had to find another way to get the curves to follow each other, so I used another series of constraints to do so.

In addition to working on the face rig for Quinn, I was tasked with helping out with her shirt. Though the body was already rigged, the collar for the shirt was not and it would often collapse and interpenetrate the body in a strange manner. The animators thus needed a series of controls that they could use to adjust the shape of the shirt collar.

The rig for the shirt collar uses a NURBs surface that has follicles on it and connected joints. This is then hooked up to a series on controls that allows the animator to shape the collar nicely. There are also additional controls for the shirt sleeves.

Quinn's ingredients chest was the last thing I was tasked to work on while I was working with Voracious games. I was given an ingredients chest with some initial controls and joints and was asked to weight paint and add in additional functionality. Some of the functionality I was tasked with added in was getting the teeth to retract and open, rigging the tongue, making sure the blendshapes worked with the weights, and to make sure that the tassle in the back moved appropriately.