Client: Showcase Canada
Lost Girl is a supernatural crime drama developed by Prodigy Pictures. The series follows Bo, a Succubus, as she learns to control her supernatural abilities and help people in need. The series has won several awards including a Gemini and was voted the “Number 1″ most pleasurable shows to watch by Slate magazine in 2012.
Teaming up with Keyframe Digital Productions, I was fortunate to have worked on this fantastic series through the development of season 4. I have played an important role within our Lost Girl team, taking on rigging jobs as well as texturing, animating, rendering, as well as data and file allocation and organization.
Tamsin’s Wings
(click to enlarge image)
One of the first projects handed to me while working on Lost Girl were a pair of wings for our resident Valkyrie, Tamsin.
After some trial and error, and a lot of research, I decided how to approach the rigs. By using a series of spline IK controls, point helpers, and lookat constraints, animators were able to get the movement they needed with a minimal amount of counter animation. (pictured below)
Using this system accounted for the feathers clipping through one another. For each tier–or row–of feathers, there is a series of controls for each side. Not only does the double sided method help deal with any clipping issues, it also helps round out the wings when the posing is pushed.
Behind the Feathers: the rig itself.
A Murder of Crows
Another of the projects handed to me was to create a rig for a crow. He had to be fully feathered and said feathers would need to react to any wind effects. I was handed a mesh for a raven that needed quite a bit of reposing and changes made to it. Once I finished those, I set to work painting the feathers onto the mesh using a tool Paul Neale was kind enough to let me use.
Unlike traditional crows, these ones had to be disheveled with feathers sticking up in all sorts of directions. The aforementioned tool really helped get the look we were all hoping for. When it came time to rig the wings, I decided to use bones and some clever skinning methods to get them to fold up properly. This simplified the controls needed and saved quite a bit of rigging time.
