Morton Rig

Full body and face rig developed for Disney Research

Features:​
-Reverse foot with bend limit and toe straight angle options
-Custom foot attributes with banking and multi-pose roll 
-Ribbon spine 
-Auto stretch IK arms and legs 
-FK arms and neck stretch
-FK/IK switching arms and legs
-Arm twist controls 
-Blendshape face rig with individual lip movement 
-Eye gaze and blinking controls
-IK hair curl 
-Dynamic parenting/space switching
-Corrective shapes for body and jaw 

Morton is one if my earlier rigs that I created for general use by Disney Research. He ended up being used in a couple of projects to help showcase up and coming technological developments. Since Morton was just going to be used in Maya, I had the freedom to implement a number of fun stretch features to fit with his cartoon-style design. Both the FK and IK systems are capable of stretching, in addition to his spine, which I constructed with a ribbon. The ribbon system allows for some nice twisting as on the body well. 

For Morton's face rig, I used many blend shapes to achieve the results of his mouth. The mouth is capable of reaching an exaggerated wide pose in particular, and the animator is able to tweak individual lip parts. The other facial features are primarily joint based, including the eyelids. I also added in an IK control to allow for animation on his little hair curl. 

Morton's reverse foot setup incorporates a number of utility nodes to achieve a three-pose roll, bend limit angle, and toe straight angles. Furthermore, I used an array of distance between and conditional nodes to achieve the stretching. While I currently implement automatic arm twisting into my rigs, I created separate arm twist controls to allow the animators to adjust the twist manually. Corrective shapes throughout the body and face help to reinforce Morton's deformation. 

Face Rig Examples:

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