This is an amazing Rig! I just recently decided to focus on rigging and this is some really inspiring stuff! I can’t wait to see the breakdown! The way the toes move and all the small gears and pipes is what did it in for me. C: This was put together very nicely and it shows all the effort put into it. Nice presentation!
Hi, this rig looks really awesome.
I am stuck to rig the leg because I set up three joints to control each axis of the thigh joint and lock their unused rotation. But it doesn’t work when I set IK. What exactly you did for this part? Thank you so much
Thanks 🙂 I’ve been planning to create a rig breakdown for this for quite some time now, I’ll try to make some time for this soon. But yeah, the legs are tricky, the way I did it (if I remember correctly) was to create a duplicate leg-joint, and then drive the out-rotation of the upper leg with that, then I used an ikHandle for the parts that was offset as you can’t drive them by just connecting the rotations to the different parts because of the offset. I’m sorry for the brief explanation, I think I’ll have to dig up the rig again to go more in detail 🙂
I must say, this is the most beautiful presentation of a rig I’ve ever seen. The transitions, animation, effects, everything about it is elegantly presented and extremely polished. Also, I love the choice of music 😉
I’m very interested in what you’ve done with the tail. It looks sort of like an interactive simulation. I’d love to hear about how you set that up. Also, I’m curious, did you do anything to automate the metal plates on the tail and spine?
The tail has a hair-curve which is driving a joint-chain through the ikSplineHandle, the input curve is skinned to the rig-joints so that you can adjust the dynamics relative to the original animation.
I believe Zeth Willie have a tutorial for that kind of setup on his vimeo-account: https://vimeo.com/zethwillie 🙂
The metal plates on the tail and the spine have automatic animation through SDKs, they’re getting driven by the rotation of the different parts along the tail and the spine. Nothing fancy 😉
Very cool. Thanks for the tut. Seeing your rig move so beautifully makes me want to go back and redo mine! Also, I just noticed. You removed the wheels that were originally attached to the cat’s feet. What prompted you to do that? Just curious.
No problem 🙂 Yeah you almost got it finished, but you had that offset on the foot, right? The reason why I removed the wheels was that I couldn’t see them having any purpose for the character, and I thought the cat looked better without them 🙂
Yeah, I had a usable full-body rig, but the feet were pretty buggy. I’m going back now and reworking it. The wheels always did seem a little wonky, but I thought it was hilarious when I imagined the cat rolling around on them. 🙂
Hahah, now when you say it, that would indeed be hilarious 😀 Give me a peep when you get it finished, it would be interesting to see some different approaches on the legs.
Thanks Rahul, it’s cool to hear that it inspired you 🙂
I’m sorry to say that I don’t have any tutorials to recommend, I searched around for mechanical tutorials myself when I was working with this one, without any luck 🙁 There might be some good mech tutorials out there, but I couldn’t find anything, other than tutorials covering basic stuff.
The Art of Rigging books from CG Toolkit are a really good resource for mechanical rigging. The URL is http://www.cgtoolkit.com/ but their website seems messed up right now, but maybe you can find where to buy them somewhere else.
Thank You Jorn Harald Paulsen , please share me more updates in specially in rigging only.
Check out Ryan Porter’s website: https://yantor3d.wordpress.com/
Hi,
Great rig you have here.
Is it still available for download? The link above doesn’t work
Hey, thanks 🙂 Yeah I found the obj on my drive, here you go: https://ufile.io/1b432
Aw. The file got removed again
Does anyone still have the obj for download? I’d love to give it a try tbh….
Here you go: http://www.riganimator.com/mecha_cat.zip
Thank you so much,
This is an amazing Rig! I just recently decided to focus on rigging and this is some really inspiring stuff! I can’t wait to see the breakdown! The way the toes move and all the small gears and pipes is what did it in for me. C: This was put together very nicely and it shows all the effort put into it. Nice presentation!
wow… awesome stuff man… hope u do the breakdown soon …
Hi, this rig looks really awesome.
I am stuck to rig the leg because I set up three joints to control each axis of the thigh joint and lock their unused rotation. But it doesn’t work when I set IK. What exactly you did for this part? Thank you so much
Thanks 🙂 I’ve been planning to create a rig breakdown for this for quite some time now, I’ll try to make some time for this soon. But yeah, the legs are tricky, the way I did it (if I remember correctly) was to create a duplicate leg-joint, and then drive the out-rotation of the upper leg with that, then I used an ikHandle for the parts that was offset as you can’t drive them by just connecting the rotations to the different parts because of the offset. I’m sorry for the brief explanation, I think I’ll have to dig up the rig again to go more in detail 🙂
I must say, this is the most beautiful presentation of a rig I’ve ever seen. The transitions, animation, effects, everything about it is elegantly presented and extremely polished. Also, I love the choice of music 😉
I’m very interested in what you’ve done with the tail. It looks sort of like an interactive simulation. I’d love to hear about how you set that up. Also, I’m curious, did you do anything to automate the metal plates on the tail and spine?
Congratulations on the great work!
Wow, thanks for the nice words Jonathan! 😀
The tail has a hair-curve which is driving a joint-chain through the ikSplineHandle, the input curve is skinned to the rig-joints so that you can adjust the dynamics relative to the original animation.
I believe Zeth Willie have a tutorial for that kind of setup on his vimeo-account: https://vimeo.com/zethwillie 🙂
The metal plates on the tail and the spine have automatic animation through SDKs, they’re getting driven by the rotation of the different parts along the tail and the spine. Nothing fancy 😉
Very cool. Thanks for the tut. Seeing your rig move so beautifully makes me want to go back and redo mine! Also, I just noticed. You removed the wheels that were originally attached to the cat’s feet. What prompted you to do that? Just curious.
No problem 🙂 Yeah you almost got it finished, but you had that offset on the foot, right? The reason why I removed the wheels was that I couldn’t see them having any purpose for the character, and I thought the cat looked better without them 🙂
Yeah, I had a usable full-body rig, but the feet were pretty buggy. I’m going back now and reworking it. The wheels always did seem a little wonky, but I thought it was hilarious when I imagined the cat rolling around on them. 🙂
Hahah, now when you say it, that would indeed be hilarious 😀 Give me a peep when you get it finished, it would be interesting to see some different approaches on the legs.
Hello,
i just saw your mechanical rigging reel “Mechcat”. I really inspired by you by this reel.
Can you please just tell me about good tutorials on Mechanical rig and dynamics reel ?
Sorry for bad English.
Thanks Rahul, it’s cool to hear that it inspired you 🙂
I’m sorry to say that I don’t have any tutorials to recommend, I searched around for mechanical tutorials myself when I was working with this one, without any luck 🙁 There might be some good mech tutorials out there, but I couldn’t find anything, other than tutorials covering basic stuff.
WOW this rig is amazing! is it for Maya perhaps? I’d love to animate it sometime!
I tried opening the .OBJ but theres no controls for me in a .OBJ to animate sadly
do you have a .MB or .MA rigged version?
I would really love to animate this if you do
The Art of Rigging books from CG Toolkit are a really good resource for mechanical rigging. The URL is http://www.cgtoolkit.com/ but their website seems messed up right now, but maybe you can find where to buy them somewhere else.