Ghost
This is a character I designed a couple years ago to practice 3D modelling. The rig is kinda complicated, especially getting the pointed parts of the cloth to move with a cloth engine, while also being controllable.
The animation itself isn’t too complicated. The movements on the character itself are pretty simple, the environment is mostly just trees and fog, neither of which were too difficult to make. By far the largest struggle was getting the rig to work reliably on the character. Some kinda hacky techniques were necessary to make it work the way I wanted. Apart from rigging all the ‘limbs’, spine and head, I also added strings of edges on each of the ‘limbs’ and put the cloth engine on those edges. After getting the bones in the ‘limbs’ to follow the cloth objects, I just had to have the cloth objects copy the rotations of an additional bone that controlled the position and rotation of the objects.
The sword wasn’t too complicated by comparison, the gears in the center of the hand guard all have their own bones that are parented to a controller (the circle in the middle of the hand guard) which when spun, also spins the gears in their respective orientations around their bones. That plus a morph to switch it between the closed and open positions, and a small polygon that spits out embers, and finally, grease penciled, frame by frame animated lasers, and you get a spectacular, fantasy-scifi looking weapon.
Overall, this project was very fun start to finish. It was a great learning opportunity for several modeling and rigging techniques that were definitely too complicated for me before I started it. I do also want to use this character for more projects, but we’ll just have to see what the future holds.