Rigging of a bomb disposal robot for use in Bravemind & STRIVE.
This little guy, a Foster-Miller TALON, wasn’t used in too many close up shots so he didn’t require too much complexity in terms of features or controls. The most interesting part was rigging the treads. The first small challenge was syncing up the UV animation speed of the tread textures and the rotation speed of different sizes of gears and wheels. The biggest issue here was actually in the rig setup; for all our characters we use a separate skinned skeleton and animation rig which are both referenced into a single file and appropriate constraints made between joints in the two, however this only works for joints, so for controlling UVs I had to introduce a new method for making arbitrary connections between nodes in the two. The other little challenge was how to transfer the UV animation info into Unity. This was done by creating a dummy joint which has the speed of the UV animation baked into it on export and then on the Unity side creating a small script component which connects the dummy joint’s animations to the two treads material UV offset.