Rig Draft

Here above you can find an image of my first draft for the rig sets of the characters. My current plan is to block out the body structures of all three forms and create the character rigs. Each form will exist out of  the same amount of blocks, accept perhaps for the tail. Then again I might scale the blocks of the tail and put it within the human character model body. I will have to check if this is a possibility.

I have collected some information about UDK and it seems there are a few things I need to watch out for when building the rig. This will influence the outcome of the final solution.

* The first thing is that I can NOT scale the rig or the nodes within an animation of the character, since UDK will not process that information.
* The joints of the rig need to be in one hierachy and all connected in to one solid skeletal structure.
* I cannot add joints to the rig during the animation, because this will also not be processed by UDK.

So what I have come up with is to create a rig structure with 38 joints and my first test will be to see if it is possible to use one rig structure for all three forms. And see if it is possible to do so without scaling or adding any joints. In this test I will also check if I can morph the body structures. What  might be a problem is the posing of the quadruped form.

During the upcoming week I will also check on quadruped rig sets, may my first test fail or not show a satisfying result I might be inclined to create a different rig for each form. It is possible to swap between rigs within UDK.

However there is a possibility it will limit the motion of the animation I want to have for the transformation or make it harder to create the animation since you need to time your animations with the swapping. Currently this is only a hunch and I could be wrong.

Also to add some additional information everything will be made in Autodesk Maya 2013.