Herd Rig Test

Herd Rig Test
Software: Maya 2009

A basic range of motion and deformation test for a creature rig from an in-house short I worked on at LAIKA in 2009. The main creature mesh is deformed using surfaceSkin, a Maya deformer plugin I was developing at the time.

Creeper Rig Test

Here is a little example of the surfaceSkin deformer at work. SurfaceSkin is a multi-influence, nurbs surface (and optionally transform) driven deformer I developed few years back at LAIKA.
The skin slide and jiggle is achieved by converting the underlying influence surfaces to softbodies, and then generating a wireframe of springs between the particles. A runtime particle expression is applied to restrict the movement of the particles to the original goal surface. Basically, at each frame the velocity vector for each particle is projected back onto the normal plane of the closest surface point.
I've been working on converting this to a stand alone deformer which will work with all surface types.