What excites me about cartoon rigging is that each project is a unique challenge. Whether it’s a simple bubblegum ball or a multi-limbed monster, every rig presents its own complexities.

Gorillaz G-Shock – Feed Me Light

I was responsible for the rigs of all the main characters and the main alien villain.

The challenge here was to create flexible rigs to easily exaggerate the poses within a relatively short timeframe.

So I used my auto-rig as the main base, but I had to improve its cartoon options to get more flexibility in exaggerated poses.

The facial rigs of all the characters were made on a simple common base, with a minimum of animation controllers, to meet the deadlines.

Safeguard – Feed Me Light

On this project, I was responsible for rigging all the main characters. While this was relatively straightforward, the clouds and water droplets proved to be more challenging.

These elements needed to deform extensively to match various designs, with features like eyebrows and teeth appearing or disappearing as needed. The most complex aspect was adding a layer of constantly moving bubbles to give them a cloudy appearance. The solution involved using a combination of modifiers, although this did affect the rigs’ framerate.

TNZPV – Les Légendaires

“Les Légendaires” is undoubtedly one of the largest projects I’ve worked on. The series had been started and then abandoned by a previous studio, so I had to rework and re-rig over 150 characters.
The animation was to be split between three studios (Tu Nous Za Pas Vus, Cube Creative, and La Station Animation). TNZPV contacted me to manage the rigging with my auto-rig tool, ensuring consistent rigs across all studios and timely delivery.

Development

One challenge was that my tools were not initially suited for a series. I spent two months developing a suite of tools to simplify managing such a large number of characters and animations. The result was a robust toolset that allowed animators to import characters, manage their display and controllers easily, and save and share animations and poses with the entire team.

Discovering Unity and Real-Time

Most of my rigging work is for pre-rendered projects, so when Nexus contacted me to create rigs for a real-time project in Unity, I jumped at the chance. This experience allowed me to adapt my rigs for real-time applications and expand my skill set.

Mighty Nice

Mighty Nice was one of the first studios to trust me with their projects. Our long list of collaborations has significantly improved my rigging techniques over time.
Pilot priest – Collectif Brutus

For this music video project, I created the complete rig for the main character, including the facial rig. The creative freedom given by Collectif Brutus allowed me to experiment with new techniques.

This led to the development of facial rigs without controllers, offering animators better visibility and control.

An example of this can be seen in a test for Engine-house studio.