Aargh the Bird

Aargh is my first filly rigged character! He was modeled, unwrapped, and rigged in Maya.

The rigging was the challenge here; as you can tell from the video, it wasn't really animation-ready. I'm proud of some things, like the stretchy neck, which can switch between IK and FK controls, the simple leg controls, and aspects of the spine. However, a lot of things didn't go as planned. The blendshapes - of which I had a nice range, controlling eyebrows and mouthshapes - got completely disconnected at some point, and I only figured out after the mesh was bound. Which is a huge lesson learned: be careful about deleting history! The arms also didn't work out so great. They're also on an IK/FK switch, so there are 3 joint chains at work, and clearly some axis are off or some rotation, when constrained to another joint, didn't maintain offset. So, switching between IK/FK can really make the arms go crazy. Lastly, the global scale controls don't work properly (some joints are clearly double-transforming when scaled) and I imagine that's because the hierarchy of joints and connections isn't organized properly. So I'm proud to show my first attempt at rigging, and I'm confident my next rig will be a lot better! However, I like the character's design and model. Here are some renders of it I made early on, when the model was near-complete and I quickly bound it to some joints to test out.

Aargh is sort my personally curated "Parts of Birds: Greatest Hits". He's got a that neck borrows from ostriches and pelicans, the beak borrows from ducks and parrots, the torso and hips come from chickens (especially the film Chicken Run), etc.

He was fun to design; I especially like his "collar", making his torso feathers look like a shirt.

My idea is that he was a sort of roguish character; he looks pretty handsome, but his body isn't exactly built to be particularly useful. He's got wimpy wings, spindly legs, and a noodley neck, so he has to make up for that with a big personality.