Introduction

My name is Phung Nhat Huy (you can call me Huy), from Vietnam. I went to Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore to study and graduated with a degree in Animation Art in 2014. Currently, I’m working as a senior rigger/TD in Omens studio, Singapore, and have been working in the animation industry for 3 years.

Ever since I was in college, I’ve always had a passion for bringing appealing characters to life. Initially, I just wanted to have a good rig so I can animate my characters without worrying about things such as flipping or bad deformation. Rigging was never easy to learn because it involved a lot of technical problem solving and step-by-step tutorials were not reliable in helping me understand it. However, the more characters I rig, the more I understand how rigging works. And the more I understand how rigging works, the more I loved the entire rigging process. Eventually, I decided that rigging was going to be my career which allowed me to solely focus on perfecting my rigs to the best of my ability and let the animators bring them to life. Solving technical problems and seeing nice deformations on my characters have always brought me tremendous pleasure. In my spare time, I also love watching movies, cooking, playing chess and video games.

For the past 3 years with Omens Studio, I have been involved in various projects ranging from animated TV series, short films, AR games and commercials such as Leo the Wildlife Ranger, Gnome, Tales of Christmas 2017 and more… I am currently working on some exciting, unannounced projects with the studio as well as a few personal projects that I intend to kick start in my spare time this year.

Modeling the character

The rig was created entirely from scratch using only Maya native tools with the exception of Michael Comet’s PoseDeformer plugin, which was used to drive some of the cloth-backed Blendshapes for the hoodie. The model was designed and modeled by my girlfriend, Jamie. You can check out her amazing work here.

There are lots of cool techniques, tips & tricks that I have learned from both Nico and Wade, in particular, Nico’s ribbon spine and Wade’s Blendshape method. What I liked about their workshops was that they were not heavily pre-planned. Nico and Wade made mistakes occasionally and because of that, I could see the way they troubleshoot and correct their mistakes which turned out to be incredibly helpful for learning how to problem solve. On top of that, their weekly feedback was highly constructive and insightful.

Challenges, tips & tricks

As with most personal projects, I try to push myself, attempting to try out something I have never done before so I definitely have met many challenges. In particular, rigs for the hoodie and boot as well as the layering of different deformers for the facial rig. Although there were a few extra features that I have added onto my rig that was not covered in the workshops, I was able to apply some of the techniques taught in there and came up with my own solutions.

Nico and Wade’s class were very different from each other as one focused on body mechanic rigging while the other focused on facial rigging. These techniques, however, can be applied to any rigging situation. They both did an excellent job of explaining the concepts behind the techniques.

Generally, most scripts I used were scripts I had written myself which includes TD_blendshapeAssistant to assist me creating Blendshape and TD_microControl to generate microcontrollers on the character face. There are also a few one-off scripts that I wrote to simply automate some tedious processes such as generating helper joints in multiple areas.

Other than that, I used Comet Scripts. They are a bunch of cool utility scripts from Michael Comet that can help to speed up processes such as naming, orienting joints et cetera… Another small but cool script that I used was sk_attrShift for rearranging attributes in the channel box.