djx blog

I'm animating a character in maya.

Over the past year I have begun to rely more and more on the zooToolbox as my primary rigging utility. Some have said I'm cheating, but I think I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants. Hamish has written an excellent suite of tools that enable an artist working in a small company with tight deadlines to easily create advanced industrial strength rigs. The zoo tools are modular and configurable and based on well written, well documented mel scripts.

I have rigged my character using zooCST. Normally thats all I need, but this character needs stretchy arms that can be bent like rubber hoses. zooCST does stretchy IK really well but I wanted more control over the bending, so I decided to experiment with Michael Hutchinson's Elastik plugin.

The Elastik plugin adds two stretchy ik solvers to maya. The stretchy ik requires no extra utility nodes or expressions and is fast and reliable. It was easy to hook this into the zooCST rig, effectively replacing the zoo arm bones with the elastik arm bones.

The result is a rig that is 90% zooCST, but now has 3 elastik control handles on each arm. The elastik handles allow the arm to be pulled into any shape and yet still follow the zoo controls. A bonus is that the elastik IK eliminates the popping effect usually associated with stretchy IK when the joints reach full extension and start to stretch. Elastik IK eases into the stretch as the joints approach maximum extension. It also handles hyper-extension just as effortlessly.

Here are some diagrams