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Technical aspects such as rigging can become repetitive and error-prone when built from scratch by hand. Tools like these allow me to focus on artistic endeavors such as character modeling, blend shape sculpting, and volume preservation.
ESM Character Rigging Tools
Biped
This tool creates a global rig by placing central and left placeholders for the joints, then it builds the skeleton, and lastly, the rig with a hybrid FK-IK stretchy spine, space switching for chest and head, squash and stretch for the limbs, soft IK, the option to pin the elbow and knees, and bendy controls.




Rig showcase after adjusting curves to fit the model
Facial
The facial section creates three local rigs. These can be connected to the global rig through 1 blend shape.
The eyebrow requires the selection of vertices from the center-out of the brow. The rig will have a main control for easy posing, four controls for curve design, and three extra controls in between those for polishing.
This setup creates a curve with a CV on each selected vertex. A joint is attached to each CV. The controls will drive a new set of joints which drive the curve through skinning. Using one joint per vertex speeds up the weight-painting process tremendously!
The eyes follow a similar setup. This time, the eye geometry is needed to find the pivot from where the eyelid joints will rotate. It is necessary to provide the UI with the vertices of the upper and lower eyelids. The setup will create a joint chain from the eye center to each vertex. A curve will be created for the upper and lower parts, and an IK single-chain solver will be what drives those 2-joint chains. The locators that drive the IK’s will be attached to the curve to simulate a sliding effect. The final setup is driven by eight controls.
The mouth section will create two setups, both have to be determined by placeholders, just like the body. One will generate a rig to move big areas of geometry such as the orbicularis oris muscle, the lips, the upper and lower teeth, and the cheeks. The other is a lip tweak setup for polishing details which will allow you to modify the mouth shape for more specific poses.

Quadrupeds

This tool creates a global rig by placing central and left placeholders for the joints, then it builds the skeleton, and lastly, the rig with a hybrid FK-IK stretchy spine, FK/IK stretchy neck and limbs, and space switching for neck and head.

Car Rigging tool
Place the landmarks on each wheel and the bottom of the chassis to generate a quick functional rig. Very useful to populate a traffic scene and background animations.

Landmark Tool
A great way to approach modeling polishing is through landmarking. This tool assigns a new material based on a selection of faces. You can choose how transparent the material is as well as its hue.

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