In the midst of waiting to hear back from my advisor regarding my thesis document, and while searching for employment, I've decided to stay busy. I don't want to get rusty, and want to keep pushing my abilities. Lately I've really been in the mood to do some animation acting work. I was tempted to pull out one of the many stock rigs floating around the internet, but was reluctant to do so. I've become jaded of seeing the same rigs in countless work online, so I decided to also push my rigging chops and build a stock rig of my own.
The idea is to have a simple character that I can use to practice animation. With this exercise, I also want to push my modeling and rigging techniques to the extreme, by adding a lot of functionality (especially extreme squash and stretch abilities).
I am also pushing my limits by trying to make this character as close to my cartoony drawing style as possible. I'll periodically update my progress on here, and if I deem the final result worthy enough, I'll even make the rig available for free download.
So far I've built the head, and have been undergoing RnD on more efficient ways to set up the functionality of the dorsal-ventrally elongated eyes that are commonly found in my characters.
-Evan B.