Company: ImageMovers Digital
Role: Character TD
Christmas Carol was my first feature film. At the beginning of my employment I helped rig the low resolution layout rigs for use in Motion Builder. This mostly consisted of weight painting and running batch scripts. Once I learned how to use the Maya API, I quickly moved into the technical team of IMD’s Rigging department where I created and collaborated on custom deformers using C++ and the Maya API, rig building scripts using Python, and dozens of animation, modeling, and shot finaling tools. Most of these tools formed the basis of the deformation rigs on A Christmas Carol as well as part of the main rigging toolbox that we used at IMD.
I contributed heavily to the facial animation and deformation pipeline and helped create the rig that uses actor facial performance data to drive character face rigs. Throughout A Christmas Carol, I was mainly in charge of developing and maintaining our Maya API toolset, building and supporting the facial rigs, and rigging some shot-specific special needs rigs.
Assets that I rigged and/or maintained include:
- Marley’s Ghost face.
- The Ghost of Christmas Past face.
- The Ghost of Christmas Present face.
- The entire Cratchit family faces.
- Old Joe face.
- Portly businessmen faces.
I also rigged shot specific rigs such as
- Marley’s jaw ripping off.
- Characters morphing into other characters
- The Ghost of Christmas Present’s skull rig.
